Were we to relate the numbers of weak and deluded creatures who, upon the slightest pretext, submit to this accursed rite, it would appear incredible. We know that one fashionable pretender to peculiar skill in the diagnostics of uterine affections, has boasted of five such examinations in one family in a single day! and that another has spoken of the exposure of _fifty_ women to his professional gaze in the same space of time. These are facts--horrible, but undeniable, facts! "O shame! where is thy blush?" O woman! where is thy vaunted modesty, in a country tainted by such unspeakable and hideous mysteries, permitted--nay, tacitly encouraged--as they are, under the hypocritical guise of scientific discovery, and the pretended mitigation of human ills? Is it possible that in this age, and in this our land, men should be found so utterly insensate, so beggared of all feeling, so lost to all the chivalry of manhood, that, with this libidinous iniquity made patent, they would not arise, and, in one mighty and overwhelming surge of execration, crush its perpetrators, and abolish this obscene invasion of marital rights. No! perish the thought! The azure blood, which throbbed and pulsated in the British heart in those far off days of the second Richard, when the indecent outrages of the poll-tax gatherers lashed the people into fury at their daughters' wrongs, still runs in the veins of Englishmen; and we will not believe that the halo of purity, which made the homes of "merrie England" the watchword of our sires, can have departed for ever from those of their descendants. CHAPTER IV. "The chariest maid is prodigal enough, If she unmask her beauty to the moon; Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes; The canker galls the infants of the spring, Too oft before their buttons be disclosed; And in the morn and liquid dew of youth, Contagious blastments are most imminent. Be wary, then, best safety lies in fear." We have already, in the foregoing pages, quoted the words of Roussel, a celebrated French physician of the last century, whose delicate and sensitive mind revolted at the indecency of the practice which had then but lately been adopted in his country; and before we proceed to quote more largely from the same author, we think it proper that our readers should be made acquainted with the character of the man who so lovingly exerted his great talents to release his countrywomen from the gross thraldom of designing charlatans and empirical impostors.