On a reflection upon these two causes, the evacuation of the seed, and the concomitancy of the convulsive motions, it is easy to explain the disorder that must result from the excess of them to the animal œconomy. They may be ranged under three heads. The depravation of the digestions. The weakening of the brain and of the nervous system. The disordering of the perspiration. We shall see that there is no chronical disease that may not be deduced from this triple cause. “The relaxation proceeding from these excesses, disorders the functions of all the organs,” says one of the authors who has written the most sensibly on the dietetic branch of physic; and the digestion, the concoction, the perspiration, and the other evacuations become respectively faulty: thence results a sensible diminution of strength, of memory, and even of the understanding; a dimness of the eye-sight, all the disaffections of the nerves, all kinds of the gout and rheumatism, an amazing weakness of the back, the consumption, a feebleness of the organs of generation, bloody urines, head-achs, and a multitude of other disorders superfluous to specify here; in short, nothing so much abridges life as the abuse of the pleasures of venery[72]. The stomach is the part the first affected by all the causes of weakness: this is owing to its being the part of which the functions require the greatest perfection in the organ. The others are, for the most part of them, as much passive as active; the stomach is almost intirely active; so that as soon as its strength diminishes, its functions grow disordered; an observable truth, which combined with the variety of the first impressions, often vexatious ones, produced upon this instrument of digestion by what is taken in at the mouth, combined too, I say, with the immediately following observation, will account for the frequency, the oddity, the obstinacy of its ailments. It is of all the parts of the body that which receives the greatest number of nerves, and in which therefore, by that very means, there must be distributed the greatest quantity of animal spirits. Whatever then weakens the action of the one, and diminishes the quantity or depraves the quality of the other, must in course more diminish the strength of the stomach than of any other intestine; and this is what happens in excesses of venery. The importance of the function to which it is destinated, is the cause, that when it is ill or deficiently performed, all the others feel it, and are the worse for it. _Hujus enim validus firmat tenor omnia membra;_ _At contra, ejusdem franguntur cuncta dolore._[73]