parts that form the floor of the female pelvis.  He found that the projection of the pelvic floor varied from nothing to as much as two inches, and that in healthy women who had borne no children the distance between the coccyx and anus, the length of the perineum, the distance between the fourchette and the symphysis pubis, and the length of the vagina are subject to wide variations. (Lancet, October 12, 1889.) Even the female urethral opening varies very greatly, as has been shown by Bergh, who investigated it in nearly 700 women and reproduces the various shapes found; while most usually (in about a third of the cases observed), a longitudinal slit, it may be cross-shaped, star-shaped, crescentic, etc.; and while sometimes very small, in about 6 per cent. of the cases it admitted the tip of the little finger. (Bergh, Monatsheft fuer Praktische Dermatologie, 15 Sept., 1897.)

As regards both sexes, Stanley Hall states that “Dr. F.N.  Seerley, who has examined over 2000 normal young men as well as many young women, tells me that in his opinion individual variations in these parts are much greater even than those of face and form, and that the range of adult and apparently normal size and proportion, as well as function, and of both the age and order of development, not only of each of the several parts themselves, but of all their immediate annexes, and in females as well as males, is far greater than has been recognized by any writer.  This fact is the basis of the anxieties and fears of morphological abnormality so frequent during adolescence.” (G.S.  Hall, Adolescence, vol. i, p. 414).

In accordance with the supreme importance of the part they play, and the intimately psychic nature of that part, the sexual organs, both internal and external, are very richly supplied with nerves.  While the internal organs are very abundantly furnished with sympathetic nerves and ganglia, the external organs show the highest possible degree of specialization of the various peripheral nervous devices which the organism has developed for receiving, accumulating, and transmitting stimuli to the brain.[77]

“The number of conducting cords which attach the genitals to the nervous centers is simply enormous,” writes Bryan Robinson; “the pudic nerve is composed of nearly all the third sacral and branches from the second and fourth sacral.  As one examines this nerve he is forced to the conclusion that it is an enormous supply for a small organ.  The periphery of the pudic nerve spreads itself like a fan over the genitals.”  The lesser sciatic nerve supplies only one muscle—­the gluteus maximus—­and then sends the large pudendal branch to the side of the penis, and hence the friction of coitus induces active contraction of the gluteus maximus, “the main muscle of coition.”  The large pudic and the pudendal constitute the main supply of the external genitals.  In women the pudic nerve is equally