hyperaesthesia and concentration of thought on sexual subjects, notwithstanding a strong will and the resolve not to masturbate or indulge in illicit intercourse.  In another case a vigorous and healthy man, not inverted, and with strong sexual desires, who remained abstinent up to marriage, suffers from psychic impotence, and his wife remains a virgin notwithstanding all her affection and caresses.  Ord considered that sexual abstinence might produce many minor evils.  “Most of us,” he wrote (British Medical Journal, Aug. 2, 1884) “have, no doubt, been consulted by men, chaste in act, who are tormented by sexual excitement.  They tell one stories of long-continued local excitement, followed by intense muscular weariness, or by severe aching pain in the back and legs.  In some I have had complaints of swelling and stiffness in the legs, and of pains in the joints, particularly in the knees;” he gives the case of a man who suffered after prolonged chastity from inflammatory conditions of knees and was only cured by marriage.  Pearce Gould, it may be added, finds that “excessive ungratified sexual desire” is one of the causes of acute orchitis.  Remondino ("Some Observations on Continence as a Factor in Health and Disease,” Pacific Medical Journal, Jan., 1900) records the case of a gentleman of nearly seventy who, during the prolonged illness of his wife, suffered from frequent and extreme priapism, causing insomnia.  He was very certain that his troubles were not due to his continence, but all treatment failed and there were no spontaneous emissions.  At last Remondino advised him to, as he expresses it, “imitate Solomon.”  He did so, and all the symptoms at once disappeared.  This case is of special interest, because the symptoms were not accompanied by any conscious sexual desire.  It is no longer generally believed that sexual abstinence tends to produce insanity, and the occasional cases in which prolonged and intense sexual desire in young women is followed by insanity will usually be found to occur on a basis of hereditary degeneration.  It is held by many authorities, however, that minor mental troubles, of a more or less vague character, as well as neurasthenia and hysteria, are by no means infrequently due to sexual abstinence.  Thus Freud, who has carefully studied angstneurosis, the obsession of anxiety, finds that it is a result of sexual abstinence, and may indeed be considered as a vicarious form of such abstinence (Freud, Sammlung Kleiner Schriften zur Neurosenlehre, 1906, pp. 76 et seq.).

The whole subject of sexual abstinence has been discussed at length by Nystroem, of Stockholm, in Das Geschlechtsleben und seine Gesetze, Ch.  III.  He concludes that it is desirable that continence should be preserved as long as possible in order to strengthen the physical health and to develop the intelligence and character.  The doctrine of permanent sexual abstinence, however, he regards as entirely false, except in the case of