Dr Albert S. Ashmead makes some apparently startling statements in a letter published in an eastern newspaper. He has spent, he says, $4000 in the investigation of leprosy in our Scandinavian population, and knows that 175,000 Swedes and Norwegians of leprous ancestry have settled in the United States, 3000 of them in Pennsylvania, while they are scattered all through the country. He says he also found three Finnish lepers in Chicago, and others elsewhere, that lepers are shipped to this country by Canadian and British authorities, and that he could put his hands on a national-bank teller whose fingers are ulcerated from leprosy, though he is not yet known to outsiders as a leper. The absence of a national leper law, he claims, permits the free introduction and spread of the disease, and the need of such is the more imperative, since with our closer relations with tropical countries at