CONCLUSION. Having reached this general result at the conclusion of the first Part of our Investigations, we would now seem only to have to co-ordinate the various pieces of evidence thus far brought together without reference to time and place, but merely on the principle of similarity of contents, under local and temporal conditions, in order to obtain a general exposition of _the development of Venereal Disease in Antiquity_. Willing as we may be to undertake the task, and necessary as its performance is,—for it is precisely this that constitutes the History properly so called of the Disease,—still we must freely admit that for the present the fixed data indispensable for the work are too few to enable us to do more than offer suggestive hints. At the same time to supply these missing data by hypotheses that must necessarily lack all positive grounds, is not, at any rate in our opinion, consistent with the dignity and duty of a Historian. As to the _local_ determinations, those defining the places, to which such or such information given us belongs, are extremely scanty, and such as they are, we owe them mainly to the non-professional Authors. Among the Physicians, who from the nature of the case must be chiefly considered here, they are all but entirely wanting; true they are almost all Greek instances, still in the majority of cases it is left absolutely undetermined whether the observations, the mere results of which moreover are given us, were made in Greece, at Rome or in Asia Minor. But even supposing knowledge amounting to certainty _were_ available on this point, yet the local range as compared with the whole Ancient world is too limited to entitle us to use it successfully as evidence in drawing up a general History of the Disease. The _temporal_ determinations are in no better case. This is especially so where the Physicians are concerned; not to mention the general uncertainty as to the epoch at which most of them lived and made their observations, they are for the most part bad witnesses for this reason if for no other, that they have obviously copied one from another, or at any rate so far as their works are extant for our examination, utilized,—with the possible exception of Galen,—certain common sources of information, which unfortunately have been completely lost. The loss is the more to be deplored as the authorities in question belonged just to the most flourishing period of scientific Medicine, that of the Alexandrian physicians.