GALEN adopts his ideas. “This humor” (says he) “is but the most subtile, the most refined part of all the others. It has its proper veins and nerves, which carries it from the whole body, to the seminal repositories, the testicles[55].” In another place, he says: “The loss of the seed is at the same time attended with a loss of vital spirit, so that it is no wonder that over-frequent coition should enervate the constitution, since it deprives the body of its purest essence[56].” The same author has preserved to us, in his History of Philosophy, the opinions of several philosophers on this subject. May I be allowed to recite them here? ARISTOTLE, whose works of natural philosophy will be in esteem as long as the value of observations shall be known, with a just allowance at once for the merit and the difficulty of opening the career of them, calls it “_the excretion of the ultimate aliment_, (which, in terms more clear, signifies the most perfectly elaborated part of our aliments) _endowed with the faculty of reproducing bodies in the likeness of that whereby it was itself produced_.” PYTHAGORAS calls it, “_the flower, or quintessence of the purest blood_.” ALCMÆON, his disciple, a great naturalist and an eminent physician, one of the first that discovered the importance of dissecting animals, and of all the heathen philosophers, he that appears to have had the truest ideas of the nature of the soul, ALCMÆON, I say, calls the seed “_a portion of the brain_.” PLATO termed it, “_an emanation from the spinal marrow_.” DEMOCRITUS thought of it as HIPPOCRATES and GALEN. EPICURE, that respectable character, who better knew than any one, that it was pleasure alone that constituted the happiness of man, but who at the same time fixed the nature of those pleasures by such rules as the Christian Hero would not disown, or object to them: yes, EPICURE, whose doctrine has been so cruelly disfigured and blackened by the Stoics, that those who knew nothing of him but through the chanel of their information, have suffered themselves to be misled by it in their opinion, to such a degree, that they have mistaken for a libertine, a debauchee, a man, “who (as M. FENELON observes) was of an exemplary continency, and whose morals were extremely regular.” To which I shall add, that his principles are the most severe censure on the tenets of his _pretended_ modern sectaries, who knowing nothing of him but his name, most basely and unworthily misuse it, by employing it to authorise systems of infamy, which he would abhor, and by which those men of probity and sense, who love the truth, ought not to permit his memory to be dishonoured, if so it was that men, themselves lost to honour, could dishonour any one. EPICURE, I say, looked on the seed as a particle of the soul and the body, and grounded, upon this idea, his precepts for the chary preservation of it.