Sterility must be numbered among the infirmities induced by excessive corpulence. This is a well attested fact in reference to the human species, and also as to the females of the lower animals. One of the professors in the Medical Faculty of Paris, while explaining in his lectures how fat could interfere with conception, never failed to cite the practice of the peasantry, who hastened to send to market those hens which became excessively fat, because they then ceased to lay eggs. Even plants lose their fertility by excess of fat. A plant growing in a cultivated soil where it finds a superabundance of food becomes sterile, because the stamens are transformed into petals, causing double flowers. The rule is, in order that a woman should be capable of conception, that she should be regular--that is to say, that she should lose each month a certain quantity of blood. Now it is asserted by medical men that, in general, those women who are thin, and who are almost without exception fertile, lose much more blood than fat women. Menstruation lasts with them from five to ten days, whilst fat women lose but very little blood during two or three days at the most. It may be added that in the first of these three days the loss is considerable, the second day there is scarcely any, and on the third day there is more, but it then ceases. Just in proportion as a thin woman becomes fat, her menstrual flow diminishes, and so much the more speedily, the quicker she becomes fat. Some women who have thus increased in fat have ceased to menstruate at thirty-five, at twenty-five, and even at twenty years of age. Some young girls, regular at twelve or fourteen years of age, on becoming fat, have ceased to menstruate and become chlorotic. One great result of the anti-obesic treatment is, that while destroying the excessive amount of fat, it causes women to become regular, and thus favours conception. Thin men in general possess greater virility than those surcharged with fat, and in proportion as this fat is developed virility is impaired and finally lost. This infirmity happens to many corpulent men at fifty, forty-five and even forty years of age. Some who were very very fat at the age of puberty, have been impotent throughout life. There are facts which prove that virility in man, like fertility in woman, may be restored on losing a superabundance of fat. CHAPTER III.