The meningeal aspect of meningococcus infections has usurped such a prominent place in the commonly accepted ideas of the nature of epidemic cerebrospinal meningitis, that important facts have been kept in the background. The very name of the disease and the causative agent have given undue prominence to a single manifestation of a condition that in our opinion is very much more than a cerebrospinal meningitis. This is by no means a new idea. Others have from time to time expressed the opinion that meningococcus infections are primarily septic in nature and that meningitis is a secondary complication. So far as we are aware, however, this conception has not been adopted as a practical working basis for diagnosis or treatment. Such prominence has been given the meningitis that the preminingitic stage of meningococcus sepsis has been for practical purposes disregarded. It is our view that in a recognition of this