Sanchez has written a dissertation on the penal cases incident to marriage; he has even argued on the illegitimacy and the opportuneness of each form of indulgence; he has outlined all the duties, moral, religious and corporeal, of the married couple; in short his work would form twelve volumes in octavo if the huge folio entitled _De Matrimonio_ were thus represented. Clouds of lawyers have flung clouds of treatises over the legal difficulties which are born of marriage. There exist several works on the judicial investigation of impotency. Legions of doctors have marshaled their legions of books on the subject of marriage in its relation to medicine and surgery. In the nineteenth century the _Physiology of Marriage_ is either an insignificant compilation or the work of a fool written for other fools; old priests have taken their balances of gold and have weighed the most trifling scruples of the marriage consciences; old lawyers have put on their spectacles and have distinguished between every kind of married transgression; old doctors have seized the scalpel and drawn it over all the wounds of the subject; old judges have mounted to the bench and have decided all the cases of marriage dissolution; whole generations have passed unuttered cries of joy or of grief on the subject, each age has cast its vote into the urn; the Holy Spirit, poets and writers have recounted everything from the days of Eve to the Trojan war, from Helen to Madame de Maintenon, from the mistress of Louis XIV to the woman of their own day. Physiology, what must I consider your meaning? Shall I say that you intend to publish pictures more or less skillfully drawn, for the purpose of convincing us that a man marries: From ambition—that is well known; From kindness, in order to deliver a girl from the tyranny of her mother; From rage, in order to disinherit his relations; From scorn of a faithless mistress; From weariness of a pleasant bachelor life; From folly, for each man always commits one; In consequence of a wager, which was the case with Lord Byron; From interest, which is almost always the case; From youthfulness on leaving college, like a blockhead; From ugliness,—fear of some day failing to secure a wife; Through Machiavelism, in order to be the heir of some old woman at an early date; From necessity, in order to secure the standing to _our_ son; From obligation, the damsel having shown herself weak; From passion, in order to become more surely cured of it; On account of a quarrel, in order to put an end to a lawsuit; From gratitude, by which he gives more than he has received; From goodness, which is the fate of doctrinaires; From the condition of a will when a dead uncle attaches his legacy to some girl, marriage with whom is the condition of succession; From custom, in imitation of his ancestors; From old age, in order to make an end of life;