British Medical Journal, April 4, 1896), in which the internal sexual organs were almost wholly undeveloped, and menstruation absent, the labia were similarly undeveloped, and the pubic hair scanty, while the axillary hair was wholly absent, though that of the head was long and strong.

We may now regard as purely academic the discussion formerly carried on as to whether menstruation is to be regarded as analogous to heat in female animals.  For many centuries at least the resemblance has been sufficiently obvious.  Raciborski and Pouchet, who first established the regular periodicity of ovulation in mammals, identified heat and menstruation.[101] During the past century there was, notwithstanding, an occasional tendency to deny any real connection.  No satisfactory grounds for this denial have, however, been brought forward.  Lawson Tait, indeed, and more recently Beard, have stated that menstruation cannot be the period of heat, because women have a disinclination to the approach of the male at that time.[102] But, as we shall see later, this statement is unfounded.  An argument which might, indeed, be brought forward is the very remarkable fact that, while in animals the period of heat is the only period for sexual intercourse, among all human races, from the very lowest, the period of menstruation is the one period during which sexual intercourse is strictly prohibited, sometimes under severe penalties, even life itself.  This, however, is a social, not a physiological, fact.

Ploss and Bartels call attention to the curious contrast, in this respect, between heat and menstruation.  The same authors also mention that in the Middle Ages, however, preachers found it necessary to warn their hearers against the sin of intercourse during the menstrual period.  It may be added that Aquinas and many other early theologians held, not only that such intercourse was a deadly sin, but that it engendered leprous and monstrous children.  Some later theologians, however, like Sanchez, argued that the Mosaic enactments (such as Leviticus, Ch.  XX, v. 18) no longer hold good.  Modern theologians—­in part influenced by the tolerant traditions of Liguori, and, in part, like Debreyne (Moechialogie, pp. 275 et seq.) informed by medical science—­no longer prohibit intercourse during menstruation, or regard it as only a venial sin.

We have here a remarkable, but not an isolated, example of the tendency of the human mind in its development to rebel against the claims of primitive nature.  The whole of religion is a similar remolding of nature, a repression of natural impulses, an effort to turn them into new channels.  Prohibition of intercourse during menstruation is a fundamental element of savage ritual, an element which is universal merely because the conditions which caused it are universal, and because—­as is now beginning to be generally recognized—­the causes of human psychic evolution are everywhere the same.  A strictly analogous