slight kisses as between young children, between parents and children, between lovers and friends and acquaintances.  Fairly typical examples, which have been reported, are those of a child, kissed by a prostitute, who became infected and subsequently infected its mother and grandmother; of a young French bride contaminated on her wedding-day by one of the guests who, according to French custom, kissed her on the cheek after the ceremony; of an American girl who, returning from a ball, kissed, at parting, the young man who had accompanied her home, thus acquiring the disease which she not long afterwards imparted in the same way to her mother and three sisters.  The ignorant and unthinking are apt to ridicule those who point out the serious risks of miscellaneous kissing.  But it remains nevertheless true that people who are not intimate enough to know the state of each other’s health are not intimate enough to kiss each other.  Infection by the use of domestic utensils, linen, etc., while comparatively rare among the better social classes, is extremely common among the lower classes and among the less civilized nations; in Russia, according to Tarnowsky, the chief authority, seventy per cent. of all cases of syphilis in the rural districts are due to this cause and to ordinary kissing, and a special conference in St. Petersburg in 1897, for the consideration of the methods of dealing with venereal disease, recorded its opinion to the same effect; much the same seems to be true regarding Bosnia and various parts of the Balkan peninsula where syphilis is extremely prevalent among the peasantry.  As regards the last group, according to Bulkley in America, fifty per cent. of women generally contract syphilis innocently, chiefly from their husbands, while Fournier states that in France seventy-five per cent. of married women with syphilis have been infected by their husbands, most frequently (seventy per cent.) by husbands who were themselves infected before marriage and supposed that they were cured.  Among men the proportion of syphilitics who have been accidentally infected, though less than among women, is still very considerable; it is stated to be at least ten per cent., and possibly it is a much larger proportion of cases.  The scrupulous moralist who is anxious that all should have their deserts cannot fail to be still more anxious to prevent the innocent from suffering in place of the guilty.  But it is absolutely impossible for him to combine these two aims; syphilis cannot be at the same time perpetuated for the guilty and abolished for the innocent.

I have been taking only syphilis into account, but nearly all that is said of the accidental infection of syphilis applies with equal or greater force to gonorrhoea, for though gonorrhoea does not enter into the system by so many channels as syphilis, it is a more common as well as a more subtle and elusive disease.

The literature of Syphilis Insontium