a stimulating effect on the organs of ovulation.  I have frequently known menstruation to be irregular, profuse, or abnormal in type during courtship in women in whom nothing similar had previously occurred, and that this protracted the treatment of chronic ovaritis and of uterine inflammation.”  Bonnifield, of Cincinnati (Medical Standard, Dec., 1896), considers that unsatisfied sexual desire is an important cause of catarrhal endometritis.  It is well known that uterine fibroids bear a definite relation to organic sexual activity, and that sexual abstinence, more especially the long-continued deprivation of pregnancy, is a very important cause of the disease.  This is well shown by an analysis by A.E.  Giles (Lancet, March 2, 1907) of one hundred and fifty cases.  As many as fifty-six of these cases, more than a third, were unmarried women, though nearly all were over thirty years of age.  Of the ninety-four married women, thirty-four had never been pregnant; of those who had been pregnant, thirty-six had not been so for at least ten years.  Thus eighty-four per cent, had either not been pregnant at all, or had had no pregnancy for at least ten years.  It is, therefore, evident that deprivation of sexual function, whether or not involving abstinence from sexual intercourse, is an important cause of uterine fibroid tumors.  Balls-Headley, of Victoria (Evolution of the Diseases of Women, 1894, and “Etiology of Diseases of Female Genital Organs,” Allbutt and Playfair, System of Gynaecology,) believes that unsatisfied sexual desire is a factor in very many disorders of the sexual organs in women.  “My views,” he writes in a private letter, “are founded on a really special gynaecological practice of twenty years, during which I have myself taken about seven thousand most careful records.  The normal woman is sexually well-formed and her sexual feelings require satisfaction in the direction of the production of the next generation, but under the restrictive and now especially abnormal conditions of civilization some women undergo hereditary atrophy, and the uterus and sexual feelings are feeble; in others of good average local development the feeling is in restraint; in others the feelings, as well as the organs, are strong, and if normal use be withheld evils ensue.  Bearing in mind these varieties of congenital development in relation to the respective condition of virginity, or sterile or parous married life, the mode of occurrence and of progress of disease grows on the physician’s mind, and there is no more occasion for bewilderment than to the mathematician studying conic sections, when his knowledge has grown from the basis of the science.  The problem is suggested:  Has a crowd of unassociated diseases fallen as through a sieve on woman, or have these affections almost necessarily ensued from the circumstances of her unnatural environment?” It may be added that Kisch (Sexual Life of Woman), while protesting against any exaggerated