A DIVERSITY of opinion still exists as to whether or not syphilis can be transmitted in the rabbit and the mouse by coitus and from syphilitic parents to the newborn. Levaditi1 and his group have reported the development of dark field-positive genital lesions through mating a normal female rabbit with a male that had syphilitic lesions of the glans penis and the prepuce. Albrecht2 also obtained successful transmissions of the disease from a syphilitic male to a normal female and found that the popliteal nodes of the female rabbit were infectious. The ability to induce symptomless syphilitic infection in male rabbits through cohabitation with females that had healed vulvar syphilomas was reported by Kolle3 and by Finkelstein and Orlow.4
Failure to transmit syphilis in rabbits was reported by Fischl,5 who in a large series found that no male rabbit with either early or late syphilis