The privation of that liquid.
The circumstances accompanying the emission.
An anatomical particularisation of the organs of this secretion; the conjectures, more or less probable, on the process of nature in that secretion; with observations on its sensible qualities, would be so many points of discussion misplaced here. To prove the utility of that liquid to the human constitution, is all that is essential to the purposes of this work; and this is to be done by the testimonies of the most eminent physicians, including withal a determination of its effects on the body.
The following Section will be appropriated to an examination of the effects which are produced by the circumstances that accompany the emission.
It was the opinion of Hippocrates, that the seed was a secretion from the whole body, but especially from the head. “The human seed (says he) proceeds from all the humors of the body, and is the most essential part of them. This is proved by the weakness, the faintness, which accompanies the loss of it in the act of coition, be the quantity never so small. There are veins and nerves, which, from all the parts in the body, concur to their centre in the parts of generation; when these are turgid, and genially heated, there is felt in them a stimulation, or pruriency, which communicating itself to the whole body, carries with it an impression of pleasure and glowing warmth; the humors enter into a kind of fermentation, which separates from them all that is the most precious and balsamic in them; and this part separated from the rest, is carried, by means of the spinal marrow, to the organs of generation[54].”
Galen adopts his ideas. “This humor” (says he) “is but the most subtile, the most refined part of all the others. It has its proper veins and nerves, which carries it from the whole body, to the seminal repositories, the testicles[55].”
In another place, he says: “The loss of the seed is at the same time attended with a loss of vital spirit, so that it is no wonder that over-frequent coition should enervate the constitution, since it deprives the body of its purest essence[56].”
The same author has preserved to us, in his History of Philosophy, the opinions of several philosophers on this subject. May I be allowed to recite them here?
Aristotle, whose works of natural philosophy will be in esteem as long as the value of observations shall be known, with a just allowance at once for the merit and the difficulty of opening the career of them, calls it “the excretion of the ultimate aliment, (which, in terms more clear, signifies the most perfectly elaborated part of our aliments) endowed with the faculty of reproducing bodies in the likeness of that whereby it was itself produced.”
Pythagoras calls it, “the flower, or quintessence of the purest blood.”