involuntary evacuation of the bladder at the moment of orgasm.  In women with less normal nervous systems this has, more rarely, been almost habitual.  Brantome has perhaps recorded the earliest case of this kind in referring to a lady he knew who “quand on lui faisait cela elle se compissait a bon escient."[115] The tendency to trembling, constriction of throat, sneezing, emission of internal gas, and the other similar phenomena occasionally associated with detumescence, are likewise due to diffusion of the motor disturbance.  Even in infancy the motor signs of sexual excitement are the most obvious indications of orgasm; thus West, describing masturbation in a child of six or nine months who practiced thigh-rubbing, states that when sitting in her high chair she would grasp the handles, stiffen herself, and stare, rubbing her thighs quickly together several times, and then come to herself with a sigh, tired, relaxed, and sweating, these seizures, which lasted one or two minutes, being mistaken by the relations for epileptic fits.[116]

The essentially motor character of detumescence is well shown by the extreme forms of erotic intoxication which sometimes appear as the result of sexual excitement.  Fere, who has especially called attention to the various manifestations of this condition, presents an instructive case of a man of neurotic heredity and antecedents, in whom it occasionally happened that sexual excitement, instead of culminating in the normal orgasm, attained its climax in a fit of uncontrollable muscular excitement.  He would then sing, dance, gesticulate, roughly treat his partner, break the objects around him, and finally sink down exhausted and stupefied. (Fere, L’Instinct Sexuel, Chapter X.) In such a case a diffused and general detumescence has taken the place of the normal detumescence which has its main focus in the sexual sphere.

The same relationship is shown in a case of impotence accompanied by cramps in the calves and elsewhere, which has been recorded by Bruegelmann ("Zur Lehre vom Perversen Sexualismus,” Zeitschrift fuer Hypnotismus, 1900, Heft I).  These muscular conditions ceased for several days whenever coitus was effected.

An instructive analogy to the motor irradiations preceding the moment of sexual detumescence may be found in the somewhat similar motor irradiations which follow the delayed expulsion of a highly distended bladder.  These sometimes become very marked in a child or young woman unable to control the motor system absolutely.  The legs are crossed, the foot swung, the thighs tightly pressed together, the toes curled.  The fingers are flexed in rhythmic succession.  The whole body slowly twists as though the seat had become uncomfortable.  It is difficult to concentrate the mind; the same remark may be automatically repeated; the eyes search restlessly, and there is a tendency to count surrounding objects or patterns.  When the extreme degree