during the acute stage, of keeping up the poultices constantly night and day. As to blood-letting, his practice is definite, though his arguments from physiology in support of it are, we must confess, insufficient for us. Local leeching is, in his opinion, vastly superior in its effects to more distant venesection; and doubtless there is much good in the practice of applying a few leeches over the groin or to the perineum. But the following argument in favour of the former plan of distant blood-letting strikes us as being of that painfully unprecise character which unhappily is so much associated with medical research:— “The profession in this country at least has lost all faith in this treatment, as well as in the corresponding doctrine regarding venesection of special veins of the upper extremity in disorders of the head. But enough remains in the well-known and, it appears to me, well-founded belief in the value and efficacy of the pediluvium in menstrual affections to prevent us from regarding these therapeutics as absurd; and, although not dreamt of in our modern and too self-sufficient medical philosophy, yet laws of sympathy between distant parts may be discovered which will explain and inculcate some such remedial measure, which now appears to be unreasonable.” How, in the name of all that is “positive” in medical science, is therapeutics to advance an inch while philosophers reason to truth in this fashion? It would not be more absurd for a chemist to support a gratuitous speculation on the faith of a future recognition of phlogiston, than for an intelligent practitioner to establish a therapeutical fact by argument such as that which Dr. Duncan employs. When the author confines himself to telling us under what circumstances blood-letting should be adopted, he gives us the result of a valuable and wide clinical experience; but his hypotheses are, we confess, too much for us. We cannot understand why Dr. Duncan completely overlooks the subject of restoratives and tonics in perimetritis and parametritis; and we should be glad to hear his reason for ignoring such very important agents in the treatment of these affections. _The Atlas of Venereal Diseases._ By M. A. CULLERIER. Translated from the French, by F. J. BUMSTEAD, M.D. Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1868.