M. HOFFMAN has also preserved to us the history of a nun, who could not be recovered out of an hysterical paroxysm but by the excital of that evacuation. And ZACUTUS, in the same work I have just quoted, speaks of two men, to whose health the suppression of the pleasures of love was a detriment. The one was attacked with a swelling at the navel which no remedy could diminish, and which was dissipated on his marrying: the other, weakened by his debauches in that way, quitted them all on a sudden; six months afterwards he had vertigos, and soon afterwards some attacks of a real epilepsy, which were imputed to some disorders of his stomach. Accordingly they gave him stomachics, which exasperated his disorder, and he died in a violent fit of the epilepsy. On being opened, every thing was found in proper order, except the _vesiculæ seminales_ and the _vasa deferentia_, which were found full of a sperm, green, and in some places ulcerous[135]. A Physician, respectable for his skill and for his age, and who long attended the Austrian armies in Italy, told me, he had remarked, that those German soldiers who were not married, and who lived chastely, were often attacked with fits of epilepsy, priapisms, or nocturnal pollutions; accidents which proceeded from an over-abundant secretion of the seminal liquid; which perhaps too had the more stimulative acridity from the heat of the country, where the diet is also more rich. We have from the same Dr. JAQUES, whom I have quoted in the second Article of this work, a thesis[136], of which M. DE LA METTRIE has given a translation[137], in which he adduces many examples of diseases produced by a privation of the pleasures of venery; and M. DE LA METTRIE mentions another work upon cloistered virginity, of which the object is the same. M. ZINDEL published at Basle, about fifteen years ago, a dissertation, in which he has collected together, scattered observations on the diseases produced by too rigid a chastity[138]. And here may be placed what M. DE SAUVAGES says of the dangers of a rigorous chastity to those women with whose constitutions it does not agree; they are so much the more the victims of the warmth of it, the more careful they are to conceal it; they pine, and fall into melancholy, disrelish of life, emaciation, and pollutions. He adds a case, which furnishes perhaps an example of the severest trial to which a conflict of constitution and virtue could expose the party distracted between them: it is that of a young girl, who, devoured with a raging fire, and yet preserving her soul pure, with an astonishing fortitude was subject to pollutions even in those moments in which she was deploring her misfortune at the feet of her confessor, a decrepid, loathsome old man.[139] “A young girl, who marries an old husband” (said a new married woman to her female friend) “had better throw herself into the river, with a mill-stone about her neck.”