I would submit to the enthusiastic immunologist that this first sensitization which he takes for granted but cannot prove is the weak spot in his hypothesis. This is the point where he needs help, and it is at just this point that de Mussy's neglected theory of gout completes the picture. The immunologist has not explained why I, a boy growing up with other boys, inhaling the same amounts of pollen as they, catching no more colds than they, and never having any serious illness, became sensitive to pollen while the others did not. There is no recollection of any "first poisoning" by pollen that might have started the anaphylaxis. But, says the immunologist, it was your parents who were sensitized and you inherited the anaphylaxis. Now, my parents lived to old age and had no sign of hay fever, though my brother had it and my children are beginning to sneeze and rub their eyes suspiciously in June and August. But if you associate hay fever with the gouty diathesis, as the clinical histories seem to justify, you enlarge immensely your opportunity to prove ancestral sensitization to whatever unknown poison originally produced the gouty sensitization. This view does not restrict you to ancestral hay fever, but extends it to gout or to any equivalent of gout. The best work in English on hay fever as an anaphylaxis is the monograph of Karl K. Koessler in Forchheimer's _Therapeusis of Internal Disease_, 1914, Volume 5, page 671, to which the reader is referred for a full discussion of the subject. The same author gives an abstract of his work in the _Illinois Medical Journal_, 1914, page 120. This article in Forchheimer is the most complete that has been written since Sticker's time and covers the ground from Sticker, who knew not anaphylaxis, to Wolff-Eisner, who is not available in English. I was gratified to find in Koessler a sympathetic soul. He thinks, as I did, that the monograph of Sticker in Nothnagel is the best review of hay fever that we have. He calls it "a remarkable monograph and the standard work on the subject." But why, oh why, K. K. K., in your own masterly article in Forchheimer, did you follow Sticker all through his historical chapter but leave out all that he says of de Mussy's theory of gout or arthritism as the constitutional basis of hay fever and also leave de Mussy and every reference to his work out of your list of _Literature_? The German books are more liberal. While most of them ignore de Mussy and his theory in their text, they all list his writings in the _Literatur_. Has the microbe of bacteriology and the laboratory bitten you so virulently that you can find no place for the gouty diathesis even in an index?