Then again with regard to the _secondary_ symptoms, the ancient practitioners in the cases treated by them made the occurrence of such all but impossible, for scalpel and cauterizing iron either entirely eradicated the contagion along with its material _substratum_, or else removed it with all speed before it could be reabsorbed into the system. Even when these did nevertheless appear, in some instances too great an interval of time intervened, in others the parts attacked were too remote from the spot primarily affected for it to have been possible for them to be referred to any direct inter-communication. Indeed this was made an actual impossibility in most cases, as it was just those very spots that are the usual seat of the secondary affections which were attacked primarily in consequence of the different modes of _Venus illegitima_ (abnormal love) with such extreme frequency as to make it barely practicable for the keenest eye at a diagnosis to discover any actual distinction between the two,—and this without taking into account the circumstance that in view of the pronounced tendency conditioned by climatic causes for the morbid process to strike outwards to the external skin, mischief in the mucous membranes and bones must necessarily have fallen to a considerable extent into the background. If circumstances put it out of the power of the ancient Physicians to unite under one whole the separate forms of Venereal disease, to look at the morbid process in its entirety, it is no less self-evident that for the same reasons they could have found no occasion to invent a _special name_ for a thing that was simply invisible to them. Hence the conclusion drawn that, because no such special name is found, _therefore_ Venereal disease cannot have existed, strictly speaking requires no further consideration. Still, granting for the sake of argument that they had recognized at any rate the generic difference of the primary affections, were they therefore bound to introduce a special name for them? _Galen_ shall supply the answer. He says, mentioning[295] that the old Physicians possessed no special name for depression of the skull in conjunction with fissure of the bone: “It is better to give a clear description than to fall back miserably on barbarous names, which the younger physicians have invented in great plenty.” In another place[296] he finds fault with the different designations given to ulcers, and then proceeds: “If I consented to enumerate all the names, I should be running the risk of deliberately teaching what I recommend others to avoid, when I say that the true searcher after truth must needs withdraw his attention from the nomenclature that has grown up, and fix his eyes on the actual fact.”