Ecclesiastical writers and moralists, as well as writers of fiction or dramatizers, can write on anything they please, and it is eagerly taken up and read by the people generally, either of high or low degree, alike; and somehow these people seem never to require an apology on the part of the author, for having attempted rapes, seductions, or even unavoidable fornication committed through the leaves of the story, or having it imaginably take place between acts on the stage. But if the physician writes a book touching anything connected with the generative functions, and with the best intent and for the good of humanity, he is expected to make some prefatory apology. He is supposed to address a public who all of a sudden have become intensely moral and extremely sensitive in their modesty. Why things are thus I cannot explain. They are so, nevertheless. From the time that the celebrated Astruc wrote his treatise on female diseases, near the end of the seventeenth century,--who felt compelled by the extreme modesty of the people in this particular--but who, outside of medicine, were about as virtuous as the average Tabby or Tom cats in the midnight hour--to write the chapter touching on nymphomania in Latin, so as not to shock the morbidly sensitive modesty of the French nobility, who then enjoyed _Le Droit de cuissage_,--down through to Bienville, who wrote the first extended work on nymphomania, and Tissot, who first broached the subject and the danger of Onanism, all have felt that they must stop on the threshold and "apologize." Tissot, however, seemed to possess a robust and a plain Hippocratic mind, and as he apologized he could not help but see the ridiculousness of so doing, as in the preface to his work we find the following: "Shall we remain silent on so important a subject? By no means. The sacred authors, the Fathers of the Church, who present their thoughts in living words, and ecclesiastical authors have not felt that silence was best. I have followed their example, and shall exclaim, with St. Augustine, 'If what I have written scandalizes any prudish persons, let them rather accuse the turpitude of their own thoughts than the words I have been obliged to use.'" For my part, I think that people who can go to the theatre and enjoy "As in a Looking-Glass," and witness some of the satyrical or billy-goat traits of humanity so graphically exhibited in "La Tosca," with evident satisfaction; or attend the more robust plays of "Virginius" or of "Galba, the Gladiator," with all its suggestions of the Caesarian section, and the lust and the fornications of an intensely animal Roman empress, without the destruction of their moral equilibrium or tending to induce in them a disposition to commit a rape on the first met,--I think such people can be safely intrusted to read this book.