“... milkmaids who drew milk from cows,
With udders kept abnormal for that end.”
In confirmation of which see “Report of the Committee, consisting of Mr. E. Bidwell, Professor Boyd Dawkins, and others, appointed for the purpose of preparing a Report on the Herds of Wild Cattle in Chartley Park, and other parks in Great Britain.” The Committee state, concerning a herd of wild cattle at Somerford Park, near Congleton, of which herd “the cows are all regularly milked,” that “The udders of the cows here are as large as in ordinary domestic cows, which is not the case in the herds which are not milked.”—(“Report of the British Association,” 1887, p. 141.)
XXIV.
1.—“Misread by man ...”
“You say ‘We marry our girls when they reach puberty,’ and you take as indication of that stage one only, and that the least certain, of the many changes which go to make up maturity. It is the least certain because the most variable, and dependent more upon climate and conditions of life than upon any true physical development. No one would deny that a strong country girl of thirteen was more mature physically than a girl of eleven brought up in the close, unwholesome atmosphere of a crowded city, yet you say the latter has attained to puberty, and that the former has not. Into such discrepancies has this physiological error led you. Without going into the domain of physiology for proof of assertion, let me draw your attention to the very practical proof of its truth, which you have in the fact well-known to you all, that girls married at this so-called period of puberty do not, as a rule, bear children till some years later, i.e., till they really approach maturity. I allow that you share this error with all but modern physiologists. Even if marriage is delayed till fourteen, where conception takes place immediately, sterility follows after; but where the girl is strong and healthy there is a lapse of three or four years before child-bearing begins, a proof that puberty had not been reached till then, although menstruation had been all the time existent. Of course there are exceptional cases, but does not the consensus of experience point to these as general truths?”—Mrs. Pechey Phipson, M.D. (Address to Hindoos).
Id. “... sign of his misdeed.”
See Note XXVI., 6.
4.—“... victim to his adult rage.”
Of this, as existent to the present age, abundant direct and collateral evidence is given by a brochure entitled “A Practical View of the Age of Consent Act, for the benefit of the Mahomedan community in general, by the Committee of the Mahomedan Literary Society of Calcutta,” published by that Society, in June, 1891, as “an accurate exposition of the object and scope of the new law, in the clearest possible language, for the benefit of the Mahomedans, particularly the ignorant classes, and circulated widely in the vernacular languages for that purpose.”