“There are great efforts (these are his terms) required to conquer a habit, that is every instant urging its recalls to us. I own to you, with blushes, that the bare sight of a female, no matter what she is, is enough to excite my desires. I do not even need that provocative; my polluted imagination is but too ready to present constantly to me objects of concupiscence. It is true that this passion never rekindles in me without my remembring, at the same time, your good advice: I struggle with myself; but even that struggle fatigues and exhausts me. If you could but find and suggest to me the means of diverting my thoughts from such objects, I believe my cure would be soon effected.” It has been seen, in my extract from the English _Onania_, that a frequent repetition had produced in a woman the _furor uterinus_. The habit of being ingrossed by one idea renders one incapable of having any others; it usurps the sole dominion of the mind, and reigns despotically. The organs constantly irritated contract a morbific disposition, which becomes an ever present goad, independent of all external cause. There are disorders of the urinary passages which give a constant tendency to make water; the reiterated irritation of the organs of generation produces a disorder, in its way, analogous to that. It is therefore not surprizing if the concurrence of these two causes, moral and natural, combined, should throw one into that horrid disorder: and how powerful ought this idea to be, for inspiring a salutary terror to all in any danger of being in this case, and who have as yet any traces of reason or shame left! A fourth cause to self-pollutors of their waste of strength, is, that independently of their frequency of emissions of seed, that frequency of their erections, though imperfect ones, of which they complain, considerably exhausts them. Every part, that is in a state of tension, produces an expence of the vital forces, and they have none to spare: the animal spirits croud thither in the greater abundance, and dissipate themselves. This is a great cause of weakness: they are proportionably deficient in the other functions, which are, in course, thereby imperfectly executed; and the concurrence of these two causes has the most dangerous consequences.