vol. i, p. 222) that there is a decisive turn in a man’s life in the sixth decade, or the middle of the fifth, when desire and potency diminish.  J.F.  Sutherland also states (Comptes-rendus Congres International de Medecine, 1900, Section de Psychiatrie, p. 471) that there is, in men, about the fifty-fifth year, a change analogous to the menopause in women, but only in a certain proportion of men.  It would appear that in most men the decline of sexual feeling and potency is very gradual, and at first manifests itself in increased power of control.

[466] See, in vol. i, the study of “The Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity.”

[467] Among animals, also, spring litters are often said to be the best.

[468] Bossi’s results are summarized in Archives d’Anthropologie Criminelle, Sept., 1891.  Alebrand of Florence, the French King’s physician in the thirteenth century, also advised intercourse a day after the end of menstruation.

POSTSCRIPT.

“The work that I was born to do is done,” a great poet wrote when at last he had completed his task.  And although I am not entitled to sing any Nunc dimittis, I am well aware that the task that has occupied the best part of my life can have left few years and little strength for any work that comes after.  It is more than thirty years ago since the first resolve to write the work now here concluded began to shape itself, still dimly though insistently; the period of study and preparation occupied over fifteen years, ending with the publication of Man and Woman, put forward as a prolegomenon to the main work which, in the writing and publication, has occupied the fifteen subsequent years.

It was perhaps fortunate for my peace that I failed at the outset to foresee all the perils that beset my path.  I knew indeed that those who investigate severely and intimately any subject which men are accustomed to pass by on the other side lay themselves open to misunderstanding and even obloquy.  But I supposed that a secluded student who approached vital social problems with precaution, making no direct appeal to the general public, but only to the public’s teachers, and who wrapped up the results of his inquiries in technically written volumes open to few, I supposed that such a student was at all events secure from any gross form of attack on the part of the police or the government under whose protection he imagined that he lived.  That proved to be a mistake.  When only one volume of these Studies had been written and published in England, a prosecution, instigated by the government, put an end to the sale of that volume in England, and led me to resolve that the subsequent volumes should not be published in my own country.  I do not complain.  I am grateful for the early and generous sympathy with which my work was received in Germany and the United States, and I recognize that it has had a wider circulation, both in English and the other chief languages of the world, than would have been possible by the modest method of issue which the government of my own country induced me to abandon.  Nor has the effort to crush my work resulted in any change in that work by so much as a single word.  With help, or without it, I have followed my own path to the end.