In particular localities this quickly happens without any striking symptoms being locally perceptible in the skin, as e. g. in Numidia, Libya[172] and the Northern part of Peru[173], where the disease is said to cure itself without extraneous medical aid, and among the inhabitants generally to be practically non-existent (?). Though this is not the case in other countries, still the cutaneous glands become involved in the morbid process of the disease, and secrete with augmented copiousness, and the secretion being simultaneously altered in character, it fails to be driven out externally, inasmuch as external elimination is at once stopped owing to the fact that the cutaneous glands, like the uterus in pregnancy, close their orifice, so as to be enabled to carry out their function in their recesses. For this reason the glands swell, and manifest themselves in the form of _papillae_ or tubercles (very often as little bladders, or blebs), changing later either into pustules, if the morbid products are eventually expelled[174], or else gradually disappear, if the process of assimilation and re-absorption has been sufficiently vigorous. Supposing damp, cold or other unfavourable influences to be at work, suppuration may very well supervene, or degenerative processes commence, and so on, and _the disease pass over into leprosy and elephantiasis_. This is above all the case in Egypt, where from the first, chancres on the genitals would seem to possess a marked tendency towards scurfy and scabby formations[175]. If these are the facts at the present day,—and no one doubts they are,—there only remains the question: were they so in Ancient times as well? Here we come face to face with the difficult problem as to the relation of leprosy with Venereal disease,—a problem which for Centuries has been the subject of dispute, and in spite of the very careful enquiries of a Hensler and of other investigators, cannot by any means be regarded as solved. Our own investigations on the Leprosy of the Ancients are as yet too incomplete, and the nature of the subject demands such far-reaching inquisition into the most widely different individual phænomena, that we are compelled, in order to economise our space, to renounce all idea of submitting the subject to any more detailed examination in the present Work. Besides, in our Second Part we shall be coming back to it again, when we have under investigation the question as to whether or no the Venereal disease of the XVth Century was developed from leprosy. For our present purpose the following statement must suffice: The Climate of Asia and Egypt was in Antiquity, as mentioned already, undoubtedly but little different from what it is to-day, and the influence it exerted therefore must have shared in this resemblance[176].