Conformably with this view, the appearance and the manners of eunuchs approach to those of women, by the softness and feebleness of their organization, as well as by their timidity, and by their acute voice.
The very opposite is naturally the result of the extirpation of the ovaries in women. Pott, giving an account of the case of a female, in whom both the ovaries were extirpated, says, the person “has become thinner, and more apparently muscular; her breasts, which were large, are gone; nor has she ever menstruated since the operation, which is now some years.” Haighton found that, by dividing the Fallopian tubes, which connect the ovaries with the womb, sexual feelings were destroyed, and the ovaries gradually wasted.
The women, also, in whom the uterus and the ovaries remain inert during life, approximate in forms and habits to men. It is stated, in the Philosophical Transactions for 1805, that an adult female, in whom the ovaries were defective, presented a corresponding defect in the state of the constitution.
To the same general principle, it has been observed, we must refer the partial growth of a beard on females in the decline of life, and the circumstance that female-birds, when they have ceased to lay eggs, occasionally assume the plumage, and, to a certain extent, the other characters of the male.
Under the influence of this cause, the first exercise of her new faculty determines remarkable modifications in woman. Her neck swells and augments in size—
“Non illam nutrix orienti luce revisens
Hesterno collum poterit circumdare filo;[31]
her voice assumes another expression; her moral habits totally change: and many women owe to love and marriage more splendid beauty.
The women thus happily constituted are not those of hot climates, but those of cooler regions and calmer temperament, whose placid features and more elastic forms announce a gentler and more passive love.
Impassioned women, on the contrary, do not so long preserve their freshness: the expansive force, from which the organs derived their form and coloring, abates; and a less agreeable flaccidity succeeds to the elasticity with which they were endowed, if the plumpness which adult age commonly brings does not sustain them.
During pregnancy and suckling, the firstmentioned class of women retain a remarkable freshness and plumpness.