One of the saddest of all the habits that young men drop into at some period of their lives is the secret vice. Until quite lately prudery has prevented its proper discussion and about the only literature on the subject was to be found in that issued by advertising doctors who treat the effects. One thing is certain--no one ever acquired the habit by reading one of these "scare" or quack books. John Stuart Mill, in speaking of this vice, says: "The diseases of society can be no more checked or healed without publicly speaking of them than can those of the body." To ignore or deny the prevalence of the evil is sometimes honest ignorance, but is more often hypocrisy. A little scientific discussion on this subject is not out of place here. It will put young men on their guard against themselves, and cut off in some degree the income of that class of doctors who live on their credulity. So far as I have been able to trace its origin it has always been with us. According to Ovid, Horace and Aristophanes, it was a curse in ancient Greece and Rome. Even Hippocrates, the father of medicine 380 years before Christ, considered it a subject worthy of his pen. Of modern writers the greatest was Tissot, in 1760, who issued a classic on this subject whose object was to stay, if possible, the abuses and vices which threatened the ruin of the French people. Lurid as the little book distributed by specialists usually is, the effects of this vice depicted by Tissot puts them all into the shade. If not exactly scientific, it at least exerted a large moral influence which was beneficial in the then state of public and private morals. In the discussion of secret sin let us make it plain that the evil effects are not immediate, as is often thought and frequently taught by school teachers and writers. The brain is not palsied at once. Dementia, palsy and sudden death are not likely to occur. The erroneous idea that it does, accounts in a great measure for the terror, the bashfulness and the love of solitude exhibited by this class of sufferers. It is enough for the purpose of this article that in the course of physical decay, gray hair, baldness and enfeebled gait, weakness of the muscular and nervous system, in fact, a general lowering of the tone of the bodily health, appear. Life has been lived out with abandon, its energies have been overdrawn and its wheels have run down like the mainspring of a clock whose regulator has been lost. The sporty and fast life led by reckless youth is making him pay the penalty. And what is the penalty? Look at the daily papers, see the brazen medical advertisements, "Manhood Restored" staring at you from every page. These advertisements are costly. They run up into the thousands of dollars a month. One man, a doctor of Chicago, formerly paid the daily press eight thousand dollars a month for advertising; his "Lost Manhood, Varicocele and Hydrocele Cured" appeared in almost every paper in this city.