after a long discussion, decides that men have stronger sexual desire and greater pleasure in coitus than women. (Historia Anatomica Humani Corporis, 1599, lib. viii, quest, ii and vii.)

About half a century ago a book entitled Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, by W. Acton, a surgeon, passed through many editions and was popularly regarded as a standard authority on the subjects with which it deals.  This extraordinary book is almost solely concerned with men; the author evidently regards the function of reproduction as almost exclusively appertaining to men.  Women, if “well brought up,” are, and should be, he states, in England, absolutely ignorant of all matters concerning it.  “I should say,” this author again remarks, “that the majority of women (happily for society) are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.”  The supposition that women do possess sexual feelings he considers “a vile aspersion.”

In the article “Generation,” contained in another medical work belonging to the middle of the nineteenth century,—­Rees’s Cyclopedia,—­we find the following statement:  “That a mucous fluid is sometimes found in coition from the internal organs and vagina is undoubted; but this only happens in lascivious women, or such as live luxuriously.”

    Gall had stated decisively that the sexual desires of men are
    stronger and more imperious than those of women. (Fonctions du
    Cerveau, 1825, vol. iii, pp. 241-271.)

    Raciborski declared that three-fourths of women merely endure the
    approaches of men. (De la Puberte chez la Femme, 1844, p. 486.)

“When the question is carefully inquired into and without prejudice,” said Lawson Tait, “it is found that women have their sexual appetites far less developed than men.” (Lawson Tait, “Remote Effects of Removal of the Uterine Appendages,” Provincial Medical Journal, May, 1891.) “The sexual instinct is very powerful in man and comparatively weak in women,” he stated elsewhere (Diseases of Women, 1889, p. 60).

Hammond stated that, leaving prostitutes out of consideration, it is doubtful if in one-tenth of the instances of intercourse they [women] experience the slightest pleasurable sensation from first to last (Hammond, Sexual Impotence, p. 300), and he considered (p. 281) that this condition was sometimes congenital.

Lombroso and Ferrero consider that sexual sensibility, as well as all other forms of sensibility, is less pronounced in women, and they bring forward various facts and opinions which seem to them to point in the same direction.  “Woman is naturally and organically frigid.”  At the same time they consider that, while erethism is less, sexuality is greater than in men. (Lombroso and Ferrero, La Donna Delinquente, la Prostituta, e la Donna Normale, 1893, pp. 54-58.)