Quod abortivo non est opus.
There are not those consequences to be dreaded, the impossibility of hiding which betrays such as have had complaisances or weaknesses in the natural way. Of this circumstance the Tribad takes the advantage to draw the young of her sex into the crime, without her innocent accomplices even suspecting the danger: and yet it is not less in that way than in other means of pollutions; the consequences are equally pernicious. All these deviations from the course of nature lead to weaknesses, languor, pain, and death. This last kind of lewdness deserves the more attention, for that it is, in our days, grown frequent, and that it would not be difficult to find more than one Laufella, more than one Medullina, who, like those Roman heroines in obscenity, think they should slight those extraordinary gifts of nature, if they did not pervert them to the confusion of the arbitrary distinction of the sex to which they were born. It is well known, that, some years ago, at a certain court, a lady was so much in love with a young girl to her taste, that she conceived a violent jealousy against a celebrated man of Literature, who had conceived a liking for her.
But it is time to have done with these melancholic instances of the depravity and turpitude of human nature; I am mortified and sick of describing them. I will not here then accumulate a greater number of facts: those which remain for me to specify, will naturally find their place elsewhere. I shall next pass to an examination of the causes of the evils proceeding from this practice, after first concluding this Section with the following general observation.
It is this. Young people born with a weak constitution, have, on a parity of crimes, much worse consequences to fear, than those who are naturally vigorous. None escape punishment, but all do not experience it equally severe. Those especially who have reason to apprehend any hereditary diseases by the father’s or the mother’s side; such as are threatened with the gout, the stone, the consumption, the king’s evil; those who have any touches of a cough, of an asthma, of spitting of blood, of head-achs, of the epilepsy; those who have any tendency to that kind of rickets which I have precedently mentioned; all these unfortunates, I say, ought to be intimately persuaded, that every act of this sort of debauchery gives a severe blow to his constitution, most certainly hastens the attack of the evils they dread, renders the fits infinitely more vexatious, and will throw them, in the flower of their youth, into all the infirmities of the most languishing old age.
Tartareas vivum constat inire vias.
ARTICLE II.
The Causes.
SECTION VI.
Importance of the seminal liquid.
How comes it that an over-abundant emission of seed produces all the evils I have precedently described? This is what I am actually proceeding to examine. These causes may be reduced to two, to wit,