[72] Freud remarks that one may often hear, concerning elderly ladies, that in their youth in the country, they suffered, almost to collapse, from haemorrhages from the genital passage, because they were too modest to seek medical advice and examination; he adds that it is extremely rare to find such an attitude among our young women to-day. (S.  Freud, Zur Neurosenlehre, 1906, p. 182.) It would be easy to find evidence of the disappearance of misplaced signs of modesty formerly prevalent, although this mark of increasing civilization has not always penetrated to our laws and regulations.

[73] “Disgust,” he remarks, “is a sort of synthesis which attaches to the total form of objects, and which must diminish and disappear as scientific analysis separates into parts what, as a whole, is so repugnant.”

[74] Senancour, De l’Amour, 1834, vol. i, p. 316.  He remarks that a useless and false reserve is due to stupidity rather than to modesty.

THE PHENOMENA OF SEXUAL PERIODICITY.

I.

The Various Physiological and Psychological Rhythms—­Menstruation—­The Alleged Influence of the Moon—­Frequent Suppression of Menstruation among Primitive Races—­Mittelschmerz—­Possible Tendency to a Future Intermenstrual Cycle—­Menstruation among Animals—­Menstruating Monkeys and Apes—­What is Menstruation—­Its Primary Cause Still Obscure—­The Relation of Menstruation to Ovulation—­The Occasional Absence of Menstruation in Health—­The Relation of Menstruation to “Heat”—­The Prohibition of Intercourse during Menstruation—­The Predominance of Sexual Excitement at and around the Menstrual Period—­Its Absence during the Period Frequently Apparent only.

Throughout the vegetable and animal worlds the sexual functions are periodic.  From the usually annual period of flowering in plants, with its play of sperm-cell and germ-cell and consequent seed-production, through the varying sexual energies of animals, up to the monthly effervescence of the generative organism in woman, seeking not without the shedding of blood for the gratification of its reproductive function, from first to last we find unfailing evidence of the periodicity of sex.  At first the sun, and then, as some have thought, the moon, have marked throughout a rhythmic impress on the phenomena of sex.  To understand these phenomena we have not only to recognize the bare existence of that periodic fact, but to realize its implications.

Rhythm, it is scarcely necessary to remark, is far from characterizing sexual activity alone.  It is the character of all biological activity, alike on the physical and the psychic sides.  All the organs of the body appear to be in a perpetual process of rhythmic contraction and expansion.  The heart is rhythmic, so is the respiration.  The spleen is rhythmic, so also the bladder.  The uterus