women. As to the former, there is not over three cases in every ten claimed to be, that are in reality so, for in the microscope we have the means of demonstrating the facts, and exposing fraud at the same time; for if semen be passed spasmodically in sleep, or under venereal excitation, we have the means at hand everywhere that cold water or chloroform can be found to put a stop to it right off; and when passed in the urine we can detect it, but require a glass of high power to do it with, because the human germs, zoas, or tadpole-like animalculae, are exceedingly minute, and ought to be magnified at least three hundred diameters to enable us to form a correct judgment, for it may happen that the semen is voided by mere stress of physical virility and long abstinence, from sudden venereal excitement, or from chemical or magnetic causes, in neither of which cases is it true spermatorrhea, which is a total inability to retain it within the body, — a circumstance of very rare occurrence! When semen in the urine, or voided other ways abnormally, is properly referable to spermatorrhea, most of the zoas will be thin, laggard, slow, or dead; but if other causes have induced their discharge, they will exhibit phenomena the exact opposite of these. And although in any case they will be dead when found in the urine, — for the salt kills them, — yet the difference between those voided from disease of the parts involved, and those accidentally discharged, is the difference between a fat dead sheep and one dead from long neglect and final starvation. The proper cure in either case is to be found in phosodynic treatment, persistently followed.
Qualitative, not quantitative, analysis, is what is mainly required in trying to learn the actual state of the body, especially in the morbid states that result from atony, perversion or inversion of the love nature and viscera.
Sometimes the system is too filled with acid, and to determine that point, dip a bit of blue litmus paper in the urine. If acid abounds the paper will redden. If alkalies prevail, test the point with turmeric paper, and it will become brown, if your surmise is right; in which case the urea has changed into the carbonate of ammonia, and must be corrected by the use of the barosmynic remedials; and the same must be exhibited if the urine gives evidence of a preponderance of uric acid, oxalate of lime, urate of ammonia, or of soda. Warm a little of the deposit in a test-tube.
