When Solomon made his despondent remark that there was nothing new under the sun and that of the making of books there is no end, he must have been in his library sorting out his collection of old Assyrian bricks and found that his favorite thoughts had been said already and said better by some old Hittite scribe a thousand years before. So I, who had fondly thought myself the discoverer of the urticarial nature of hay fever because I had searched the books of the specialists and found nothing about it, was surprised to find my observation anticipated by the Frenchman. _Salut!_ Hail to you across the years, Gueneau de Mussy, kindred spirit. It is not recorded that the gray-headed Dean of a great university ever stood you on a platform and hurled Latin adjectives at you; but in 1868 you had the sharpest eyes and clearest mind of any of them, M.D.'s or LL.D.'s, though bespattered with all the letters of the alphabet. Of all the foolish things that scientific men quarrel about, one of the most foolish is the question of priority of discovery. A scientist who will welcome the opinion of another scientist agreeing with him the day after he announces his discovery will fight like a cat against evidence that the same man agreed with him the day before. It seems to me that if another human being confirms your work, it does not make any difference whether he does it the century before or after your transient existence. In fact, you should be more pleased to have it "confirmed" the century before, because then you will have a chance to know about it. Besides recognizing the urticarial nature of the lesion, de Mussy sought the underlying cause of hay fever and thought to find it in the gouty diathesis. He notes the occurrence of hay fever in gouty families, its periodicity, its association with urticaria, eczema, granular pharyngitis and asthma, all characteristics of gout or arthritism. As de Mussy's lecture is not readily available, I quote from the _Boston Journal_ some of his conclusions. "I have dwelt at length on the constitutional condition in order to show in what diathetic conditions spasmodic catarrh has developed. The direct and collateral hereditary tendency appears to indicate a diathetic origin. The two sisters belong to a gouty stock. Chronic urticaria and granular pharyngitis are not rare in gouty families. "Periodicity is characteristic of many arthritic affections. The spring-time periodicity is especially common to them. The periodicity of this coryza places it in the same category as the arthritic affections which generally manifest themselves by regular or irregular paroxysms. "If hay fever has been more often noticed in England than France, can this be due to the greater frequency of gout in the former country?