the husband to understand the lover’s part.  We make a false analogy when we compare the courtship of animals exclusively with our own courtships before marriage.  Courtship, properly understood, is the process whereby both the male and the female are brought into that state of sexual tumescence which is a more or less necessary condition for sexual intercourse.  The play of courtship cannot, therefore, be considered to be definitely brought to an end by the ceremony of marriage; it may more properly be regarded as the natural preliminary to every act of coitus.

Tumescence is not merely a more or less essential condition for proper sexual intercourse.  It is probably of more fundamental significance as one of the favoring conditions of impregnation.  This has, indeed, been long recognized.  Van Swieten, when consulted by the childless Maria Theresa, gave the opinion “Ego vero censeo, vulvam Sacratissimae Majestatis ante coitum diutius esse titillandam,” and thereafter she had many children.  “I think it very nearly certain,” Matthews Duncan wrote (Goulstonian Lectures on Sterility in Woman, 1884, p. 96), “that desire and pleasure in due or moderate degree are very important aids to, or predisposing causes of, fecundity,” as bringing into action the complicated processes of fecundation.  Hirst (Text-book of Obstetrics, 1899, p. 67) mentions the case of a childless married woman who for six years had had no orgasm during intercourse; then it occurred at the same time as coitus, and pregnancy resulted.

Kisch is very decidedly of the same opinion, and considers that the popular belief on this point is fully justified.  It is a fact, he states, that an unfaithful wife is more likely to conceive with her lover than with her husband, and he concludes that, whatever the precise mechanism may be, “sexual excitement on the woman’s part is a necessary link in the chain of conditions producing impregnation.” (E.H.  Kisch, Die Sterilitaet des Weibes, 1886, p. 99.) Kisch believes (p. 103) that in the majority of women sexual pleasure only appears gradually, after the first cohabitation, and then develops progressively, and that the first conception usually coincides with its complete awakening.  In 556 cases of his own the most frequent epoch of first impregnation was found to be between ten and fifteen months after marriage.

The removal of sexual frigidity thus becomes a matter of some importance.  This removal may in some cases be effected by treatment through the husband, but that course is not always practicable.  Dr. Douglas Bryan, of Leicester, informs me that in several cases he has succeeded in removing sexual coldness and physical aversion in the wife by hypnotic suggestion.  The suggestions given to the patient are “that all her womanly natural feelings would be quickly and satisfactorily developed during coitus; that she would experience no feeling of disgust and nausea, would have no