[98] Max Flesch, “Ehe, Hygine und Sexuelle Moral,” Mutterschutz, 1905, Heft 7.

[99] See the Section on Touch in the fourth volume of these Studies.

[100] “I have had two years’ close experience and connexion with the Trappists,” wrote Dr. Butterfield, of Natal (British Medical Journal, Sept. 15, 1906, p. 668), “both as medical attendant and as being a Catholic in creed myself.  I have studied them and investigated their life, habits and diet, and though I should be very backward in adopting it myself, as not suited to me individually, the great bulk of them are in absolute ideal health and strength, seldom ailing, capable of vast work, mental and physical.  Their life is very simple and very regular.  A healthier body of men and women, with perfect equanimity of temper—­this latter I lay great stress on—­it would be difficult to find.  Health beams in their eyes and countenance and actions.  Only in sickness or prolonged journeys are they allowed any strong foods—­meats, eggs, etc.—­or any alcohol.”

[101] Fere, L’Instinct Sexuel, second edition, p. 332.

[102] Rural life, as we have seen when discussing its relation to sexual precocity, is on one side the reverse of a safeguard against sexual influences.  But, on the other hand, in so far as it involves hard work and simple living under conditions that are not nervously stimulating, it is favorable to a considerably delayed sexual activity in youth and to a relative continence.  Ammon, in the course of his anthropological investigations of Baden conscripts, found that sexual intercourse was rare in the country before twenty, and even sexual emissions during sleep rare before nineteen or twenty.  It is said, also, he repeats, that no one has a right to run after girls who does not yet carry a gun, and the elder lads sometimes brutally ill-treat any younger boy found going about with a girl.  No doubt this is often preliminary to much license later.

[103] The numerical preponderance which celibate women teachers have now gained in the American school system has caused much misgiving among many sagacious observers, and is said to be unsatisfactory in its results on the pupils of both sexes.  A distinguished authority, Professor McKeen Cattell ("The School and the Family,” Popular Science Monthly, Jan., 1909), referring to this preponderance of “devitalized and unsexed spinsters,” goes so far as to say that “the ultimate result of letting the celibate female be the usual teacher has been such as to make it a question whether it would not be an advantage to the country if the whole school plant could be scrapped.”