_Tactile eroticism._—Worse than mental erethism is tactile eroticism. By tactile eroticism is understood, keeping the genital organs constantly irritated by dalliance with individuals of the other sex, stopping short of the act of copulation. On a walk through the city parks, any summer evening, or on a trip on the Sunday excursion boats, young men and women may be observed lying in each other’s arms in a continual caress, kissing, hugging, and fondling each other for hours, scarcely confining themselves within the limit of decency. These couples are actually exercising the sexual act, although they do not obtain sexual congress. These tremors and ecstasies, these amorous ardors and intoxications, these sensual joys which stimulate with rapture the higher centres and infuse the mind with sexual gratification, are all a part of the chain of the sexual act. The interruption of this chain of impulses short of copulation may satisfy the moral conscience of the young people, but it does not make such excesses less injurious. On the contrary, the generative organs are deprived of the relief which ejaculation lends to these organs. The genital tube remains surcharged with blood, and the hyperaemia subsides but slowly. The normal outlet of the sex-activity has been cut off by a special process of repression. If these frustrate stimulations are frequently repeated, they perpetuate the genital congestion, and through the retention of the secretions, a catarrh of the genital organs ensues, just as inflammations often originate in the mammary glands through the accumulation of the milk after weaning the child. These perennial congestions are the cause of prostatic inflammations not seldom met with in young men who never were infected by gonorrhoea. The ulcerations of the cervix so often found in young girls and young mothers of one child may often be attributed to no other cause than to frustrate eroticism in the young girls and to onanism[AT] in the young mothers. The cervix is damaged in the same way as the soil, burned by the sun, in the absence of a beneficent rain, cracks and slits. The frequently repeated engorgements of the blood vessels which do not receive the normal physiological relief by ejaculation provoke in both parties an exaggerated sex-sense and produce the emotions, known as satyriasis in men and as nymphomania in women. The exaggeration is followed later on by exhaustion of the libidinous impulses, and the men become hypochondriacs and impotent and women neurotic and shallow. The continual congestion in the genitals causes also a continued feeling of heaviness and discomfort in the lower abdomen. Urination becomes frequent in both sexes, and in women menstruation is irregular. The patients complain of profuse pains in the back, legs, sides, and of weakness, nervousness and sleeplessness. These troubles cause general debility and a complete breakdown of the nervous system.