birth (A.D. 570) and thence overspread the civilised world, as an epidemic, an endemic and a sporadic successively.  The “Greater Pox” has appeared in human bones of pre historic graves and Moses seems to mention gonorrhoea (Levit. xv. 12).  Passing over allusions in Juvenal and Martial,[FN#186] we find Eusebius relating that Galerius died (A.D. 302) of ulcers on the genitals and other parts of his body; and, about a century afterwards, Bishop Palladius records that one Hero, after conversation with a prostitute, fell a victim to an abscess on the penis (phagedaenic shanker?).  In 1347 the famous Joanna of Naples founded (aet. 23), in her town of Avignon, a bordel whose in-mates were to be medically inspected a measure to which England (proh pudor!) still objects.  In her Statuts du Lieu-publiqued’Avignon, No. iv. she expressly mentions the Malvengut de paillardise.  Such houses, says Ricord who studied the subject since 1832, were common in France after A.D. 1200; and sporadic venereals were known there.  But in A.D. 1493-94 an epidemic broke out with alarming intensity at Barcelona, as we learn from the “Tractado llamado fructo de todos los Sanctos contra el mal serpentino, venido de la Isla espanola,” of Rodrigo Ruiz Dias, the specialist.  In Santo Domingo the disease was common under the names Hipas, Guaynaras and Taynastizas:  hence the opinion in Europe that it arose from the mixture of European and “Indian” blood.[FN#187] Some attributed it to the Gypsies who migrated to Western Europe in the xvth century:[FN#188] others to the Moriscos expelled from Spain.  But the pest got its popular name after the violent outbreak at Naples in A.D. 1493-4, when Charles viii. of Anjou with a large army of mercenaries, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and Germans, attacked Ferdinand ii.  Thence it became known as the Mal de Naples and Morbus Gallicus-una gallica being still the popular term in neo Latin lands-and the “French disease” in England.  As early as July 1496 Marin Sanuto (Journal i. 171) describes with details the “Mal Franzoso.”  The scientific “syphilis” dates from Fracastori’s poem (A.D. 1521) in which Syphilus the Shepherd is struck like Job, for abusing the sun.  After crippling a Pope (Sixtus iv.[FN#189]) and killing a King (Francis I.) the Grosse Verole began to abate its violence, under the effects of mercury it is said; and became endemic, a stage still shown at Scherlievo near Fiume, where legend says it was implanted by the Napoleonic soldiery.  The Aleppo and other “buttons” also belong apparently to the same grade.  Elsewhere it settled as a sporadic and now it appears to be dying out while gonorrhoea is on the increase.[FN#190]