seq.), and devotes a short chapter to the question, “Is the Menstrual Rhythm peculiar to the Female Sex?” He brings forward a few pathological cases indicating such a rhythm, but although he had written a letter to the Lancet, asking medical men to supply him with evidence bearing on this question, it can scarcely be said that he has brought forward much evidence of a convincing kind, and such as he has brought forward is purely pathological.  He believes, however, that we may accept a monthly cycle in men.  “We may,” he concludes, “regard the human being—­both male and female—­as the subject of a monthly pulsation which begins with the beginning of life, and continues till death,” menstruation being regarded as a function accidentally ingrafted upon this primordial rhythm.

It is not unreasonable to argue that the possibility of such a menstrual cycle is increased, if we can believe that in women, also, the menstrual cycle persists even when its outward manifestations no longer occur.  Aetius said that menstrual changes take place during gestation; in more modern times, Buffon was of the same opinion.  Laycock also maintained that menstrual changes take place during pregnancy (Nervous Diseases of Women, p. 47).  Fliess considers that it is certainly incorrect to assert that the menstrual process is arrested during pregnancy, and he refers to the frequency of monthly epistaxis and other nasal symptoms throughout this period (W.  Fliess, Beziehungen zwischen Nase und Geschlechts-Organen, pp. 44 et seq.).  Beard, who attaches importance to the persistence of a cyclical period in gestation, calls it the muffled striking of the clock.  Harry Campbell (Causation of Disease, p. 54) has found post-climacteric menstrual rhythm in a fair sprinkling of cases up to the age of sixty.

It is somewhat remarkable that, so far as I have observed, none of these authors refer to the possibility of any heightening of the sexual appetite at the monthly crisis which they believe to exist in men.  This omission indicates that, as is suggested by the absence of definite statements on the matter of increase of sexual desire at menstruation, it was an ignored or unknown fact.  Of recent years, however, many writers, especially alienists, have stated their conviction that sexual desire in men tends to be heightened at approximately monthly intervals, though they have not always been able to give definite evidence in support of their statements.

Clouston, for instance, has frequently asserted this monthly periodic sexual heightening in men.  In the article, “Developmental Insanity,” in Tuke’s Psychological Dictionary, he refers to the periodic physiological heightening of the reproductive nisus; and, again, in an article on “Alternation, Periodicity, and Relapse in Mental Diseases” (Edinburgh Medical Journal, July, 1882), he records the case of “an insane gentleman, aged 49, who,