sical, such as are ethical, such as are psychological. The thief is worse punished than by whitlows on his fingers by an accusing conscience, and, if taken and convicted, by the penal laws of his country. The man who should deny that pilfering is punished by whitlows on the fingers is not on this account to be held up as a person who advocates theft. On the contrary, if it were not punished at all in any known way, it would be right to speak of it as a crime which may be committed, secularly speaking, with impunity: it is always right to speak truth. Wrong doing would nevertheless still be wrong doing; crime still crime. We should never condescend to say anything that is disingenuous. In treating this subject, as every other, we should proceed in the spirit of calm research, desirous only to arrive at the exact truth. Solitary emissiones spermaticæ may occur,

I. Involuntarily. "When it occurs spontaneously during sleep, in a healthy and continent individual, it doubtless," says Lallemand," exerts a beneficial influence on the economy, by freeing it from a source of excitement, the prolonged accumulation of which might derange the animal functions." "In these cases," he adds, "it has an effect analogous to that produced by the epistaxis, common and beneficial during youth." (We cite M. Lallemand, without fully concurring with him on this point.)

II. Voluntarily. When such crisis of accumulated secretion is anticipated under the excitement of erotic reveries, in place of erotic dreams. (We think, the foregoing postulate being conceded, this follows.)

III. Voluntarily. When the habit of yielding to the growing influence of this infatuation is established.

IV. Involuntarily. In those cases in which spermatorrhoea, owing to whatever cause or causes, exists; in which emissiones spermatica seldom take place actively, often wholly passively.

Not to speak of extreme cases, such as that of Richerand's shepherd, and to avoid speaking of such, not because they are extreme, but because they are rare, if self-abuse causes, physically, a certain set of symptoms, the question is, in what way does it so act as to cause them? It must act appreciably and discoverably. Is it to the amount of constitutional excitement, as excitement, or of the orchial secretion as such, and with relation simply to the quantity of it, that the alleged mischief is to be ascribed? Or is it wholly qualitative, as being self-induced? Taking the question first as simply quantitative, it comes precisely under the same rule as excess in coitu naturali, differing from this only qualitatively. We are warranted in placing them, quantitatively, on the same footing. What may be deficiency or privation, what moderation, what excess, in the latter case, is a matter of individual experience, scarcely

admitting of any limit or prescription. What would be excess in one person's case, would not be so in another's. That only is excess which is proved to be excess by a person's health suffering from it. That is not excess concomitantly with which a state of generally good health is maintained. All that we say, quantitatively speaking, of excess in coitu naturali applies equally to self-abuse, if the amount of orchial discharge be alone considered. We mention this the more pointedly, because we well recollect having met with books, written with good intentions, their object being to deter young people from the practice of this vice, wherein calculations are made showing how each emissio spermatica causes an outlay of the vis vitæ equivalent to the loss of an incredible number of ounces or pounds of blood. Excess is excess, and we cannot commit excesses with impunity. Morality never requires to be crutched upon falsehoods: in the foregoing assertion there is a sad want of verity: after established puberty, nature provides for the practicability of coitus interconnubialis for an uninterrupted continuance, so long as life, or at least so long as vigour, lasts, without subjecting the party or parties to a tax upon their constitutions by any means so heavy as would be imposed upon them by a like series of abstractions of blood by means of venesection. The question, then, is clearly not quantitative any farther than as the former question is quantitative. Taking into view any given continuous decade of married life, there is nothing probably in which nature is a better guide. But having settled the question of quantity, there is quality also; there is the mode in which the emissio spermatica is induced; we have to consider it as self-induced. There is an abandonment of nature; and Nature ceases to smile on, and to guide, those who forsake her paths. The question of quantity, indeed, is only settled as a question per se: we have yet to consider how far this is qualitatively determined. We beg our readers, moreover, to bear in mind that we are at present treating the subject in strict relation to its physical, not its moral, features. It is our part to proceed some steps farther, divested of all moral preconceptions whatever. In coitus naturalis, there are two wills to be consulted; in this vice, one only. In the latter, there may be a want of inducement, there may be the want of a check it is the want of a check that is most usual: there is therefore more likelihood of excess both of sensorial excitement, and of emissio seminalis to a degree which the constitution will complain of, and nature will resent as extortionate, in the course of a practice of this vice, than in the course of a practice of concubitation. But this only amounts to a likelihood: there may be such excess in either as to injure the health : self-abuse may make such approaches to the involuntary and unconscious, may take place so infrequently, as not to affect the health, except salutarily. It is when it becomes, like opium-eating, an established infatu

ation, that any dreadful physical retribution ensues. The retribution then is sometimes most severe : the practice of this vice innately tends so to establish itself. There are fortunately, however, many checks to its establishment, which sometimes avail, and sometimes do not avail. We are to do what is right, not what is, or is fancied to be, salutary. But that is a moral consideration with which we shall have to do hereafter. We are now treating it exclusively as a matter of investigation in physics, not as a theme of ethical inquiry. Quitting the path of à priori reasoning, we shall find that this vice has its memoirs, its history, its biographies. There are cases which can scarcely be said to be cases at all; there are average cases; there are extreme cases. As in syphilis and blenorrhagia, the physical punishment bears no proportion whatever to the degree of moral delinquency. The natural history of average, or to speak more correctly, of usual, cases will be much as follows. At the age of puberty, persons, from tradition, books, conversation, experience, nature, obtain a knowledge of certain circumstances connected with their physical condition that was unpossessed by them before. A species of sixth sense is awakened into being. There are certain changes in the physical condition. It is not an uncommon thing for boys at school, at the initiatory period of such changes, to teach each other to perform certain experiments in natural philosophy upon their persons; to adduce and to boast of certain proofs of puberty. In other instances, such experiments are practised spontaneously and solitarily. We have to do now, and while proceeding on this especial line of investigation, with what is and is not, not with what is or is not right. There is sometimes a course of evil habit established; it goes sometimes to great lengths; but this, as we are disposed to think, but seldom: in the case of Richerand's shepherd, with which every medical man is familiar, there was an uninformed mind, there was a singularly secluse avocation. But in the usual course of time and life, there come shame and enlightenment of mind. There are interruptions to such habits. There is the devotion of the physical and mental energies to various pursuits which engross those energies. Those energies are not unlimited; and, while healthily employed, vice itself necessarily fails to monopolize them. Society finds a thousand modes for their employment and expenditure, all of which act as safety-valves to the system, both physically and morally. From the cabin-boy, who is kept upon the run on board ship, and whose indolence and negligence, if indolent and negligent, are followed up by the application of a rope's-end, to the man reading hard for honours at Oxford or Cambridge, the various duties of various stations in life exact the devotion of the bodily and mental powers. These powers have their limits; and their exercise in the path of duty renders excess in the vice alluded to improbable, if not impracticable.

Attachments to woman and to virtue will be formed. It is a complaint which, for the most part, effects its own cure. The degrees in which it exists are various. There are beyond question cases in which, physically speaking, it is severely visited. There is lassitude of body, incapacity of mind; there is frequent micturition; there are disturbances of the genito-urinary organs: there is sometimes spermatorrhoea with the thousand ills attending in its train. In cases less extreme, there are self-reproaches; there is an accessibility to the frauds of designing empirics, who lead their victims many a painful dance through the thorny labyrinths constructed for their entanglement. They have to pass through hallucinations of terror and misery, even if they remain physically unscathed. The physical ill consequences of this vice, except in unusual cases, are trifling; but there are not wanting those who, for the sake of gain, are willing to make much of them. Spermatorrhoea is produced by many other causes besides this, which does not invariably, nor yet frequently, but only occasionally, terminate in spermatorrhoea. By whatever cause induced, it admits of treatment, and generally of cure. One important physiological fact is confirmed and illustrated by M. Lallemand-the facility with which disorder and disease are propagated along its mucous lining, throughout the genito-urinary system. The return of spermatorrhoea upon the retrocession of cutaneous disease comes rather under a general rule than a special regulation. The sympathy of the skin with the mucous membranes is more than sympathy: the skin being continuous, although not identical, with the internal mucous membrane, the cuticle of the former being merely its indurated exterior. This species of metastasis is not infrequent to whatever disease of any internal organ a patient may be pre-disposed. When tinea in infants is cured too speedily by external applications, without a course of alterative medicine, such metastases often prove fatal. Nevertheless, we do not think that, in that section in which cutaneous disease is treated of as one of the causes of spermatorrhoea, the conclusions of M. Lallemand are quite correct. We should rather pronounce, perhaps, that his opinions are in that section expressed somewhat unguardedly. In some of the cases he records, the patients have been worn out by a complication of diseases of which spermatorrhoea is rather the assumed than the clearly detected origin. There is one source of error in relation to the discovery of spermatozoa in the urine that should be borne in mind. Emissio spermatica does not occur in the manner of an arrow discharged from a bow, but by a succession of jets as from a fountain. There may be the presence of spermatozoa in the urine owing to this circumstance and to the desire for micturition which is apt to be experienced after each emissio seminalis. Their presence may in some cases only prove the frequency of this, however induced. M.

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Lallemand quotes and confirms the ancient medical adage, raro mingitur castus:" it might also be said rarius mingit castus. The affinity between all the genito-urinary organs has been well made out by M. Lallemand. Practically, the application of nitrate of silver in the chronic stage of blenorrhagia and in gleet, as in spermatorrhoea, would seem worthy of careful trial. We have occasion to remark throughout the work of M. Lallemand how much depends upon judicious discrimination-how much danger attends upon the treatment of cases empirically. M. Lallemand does not treat all cases of ascertained spermatorrhoea by the application of nitrate of silver, without reference to its causes, or the conditions which the case presents. We recommend to our medical readers a careful perusal of his work, or of Mr. McDougall's excellent translation. Before quitting this department of the subject-namely the strictly physical ill-consequences of masturbation-we wish to repeat, that it does not, as the rule, cause spermatorrhoea, which only results occasionally from this cause, and then, for the most part, when it exists conjointly with other causes, and that it is a complaint which is also often seen as the result of other causes uncoupled and unconnected with this. There are those who find and make it to their interest to represent this otherwise. When it causes spermatorrhoea, it of course may be said also to cause all the symptoms which characterize this complaint. To John Hunter's remark, that apparatus designed for a twofold purpose does not act so well as apparatus devoted to one special purpose, we might have added one self-evident assertion of Lallemand, to the effect that, among animals, quadrupeds show that they would commit acts of abuse if they could, but they cannot; monkeys can and do. Comparative physiology has its points of interest as well as comparative anatomy.

We next come to those results of this species of moral obliquity which are psychological rather than physical. We much suspect that there are few of either sex in whom erotic reveries have never at any time anticipated those healthy and continent pertes seminales involontaires, which Lallemand speaks of as the natural results of erotic dreams. There is no doubt that what he speaks of may and does occasionally occur; but we do not accept without demur of his interpretation of this circumstance as a consequence and a proof of either continence or health. Tout au contraire, we should deem it a proof of some degree of moral weakness conjoined with an equivalent of physical debility. "Les desirs toujours reprimées cessent renaitre." There is no periodicity in paroxysms of erotic excitement among human beings as among the inferior animals, nor other periodicity, except such as we ourselves may have established into habit. If it be worth while to investigate any subject at all, it is worth while to investigate it thoroughly. The pertes