The particulars of this case, with the success of my method of treatment of it, will appear, in their place, in this work; and I furnish them with the more reason, for that he was the most weakened and the most governable of any patient I have seen. A third, who had abandoned himself to this detestable practice, at the age of twelve years, appeared to have suffered even more in his intellectual faculties than in his bodily health. To the following purpose was the account of himself: “I feel (says he) my warmth sensibly diminish. My sensations are considerably dulled; the fire of my imagination greatly slackened; the sense of my existence infinitely less quick; every thing that passes at present before me appears to me like a dream; I have difficulty of conception, and less presence of mind; in short, I feel I am perishing, though I preserve my sleep, my appetite, and am not much altered in my looks.” A consequence, and not a rare one, of this practice, is the Hypochondrialgia, and if those who are Hypochondriacs, from other causes, abandon themselves to it, all the symptoms of that disorder are exasperated by it, and it becomes incurable. I have seen the most cruel inquietude, agitations, anxieties result from these two causes united; and repeated observations have proved to me, that, in those Hypochondriacs, who are subject sometimes to attacks of delirium, or frenzy, self-pollution always hastens on the fits. The brain, weakened by this double cause, successively loses its faculties, and the patients fall at length into a state of an idiotism, which is never interrupted but by some attacks of madness. The _Memoirs of curious Naturalists_ mention a melancholic man, who, in pursuance of Horace’s advice, used, sometimes, to seek in wine, a diversion from his melancholy, and who, in the honey-moon of his second marriage, having indulged excessively the pleasures of coition, fell into so dreadful a frenzy, that it was necessary to chain him down[36]. JAKIN, in his Commentaries upon RHAZES, has preserved to us the history of a melancholic man, whom excesses of that kind threw into a consumption, attended with a frenzy, which made an end of him in a few days[37]. It is well known that the epileptical paroxysms, accompanied with an effusion of the seminal liquid, leave a greater faintness and stupor than other fits, without that symptom. Coition will provoke and bring on the fits of that disorder, in those who are subject to it; and it is to this cause that M. VAN SWIETEN imputes the great faintness into which those fall, who have frequent returns of those fits[38]. The late M. DIDIER knew a merchant of Montpelier, who never performed the act of coition without having immediately after it an attack of the epilepsy[39]. GALEN makes the like observation[40]. The Observations of HENRICUS AB HEERS, not to mention many others, attest the like effect[41].