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DISEASES OF THE GENERATIVE SYSTEM. 411
caresses of some strong, healthy man. This magnet
ism gives a strength, health, and life, of which few are
- aware, but which every exhausted nature craves with
an infinite longing. When a delicate, exhausted woman
lies upon the bosom of a strong man, with his loving
arms around her, a new life is infused into her being.
But when barrenness comes from excessive action,
it must be treated like nymphomania ; and the woman
who desires to have a child by the man she loves, should
receive his embrace at the proper period, which I have
already pointed out, and but once. She repeats
it at
the risk of losing her desires. She must wait until the
recurrence of the period.
Where there are diseases or displacements, they
must be remedied. There are more impotant and
sterile men than barren women. Nature has provided
for this, in her maternal care for the species. No
woman can be the mother of more than twenty or
thirty children at the utmost, but any well man may be
the father of thousands. A woman can possibly have
one or two children every year; a man may possibly
have a huulred in the same period.
*;he noblest animals below man, only the most
Among
vigorous males are allowed to procreate.
Nature has
so provided for the conservation of the species ; but
every miserable, diseased, idiotic specimen of humanity
thinks he has a right to beget children, and perpetuate
his diseases in a miserable and depraved offspring. If I
believed in the principle of the Maine liquor law, I
should be in favor of one to prevent the perpetuation of
human vices and miseries by hereditary transmission.
I have no faith in such laws ; but I have much faith in