Disparity of Age.--Both nature and custom seem to indicate that the husband should be a little older than the wife. Several reasons might be given for this; but we need not mention them. When, however, the difference of ages reaches such an extreme as thirty, forty, even fifty or more years, nature is abused, good taste is offended, and even morality is shocked. Such ill-sorted alliances are disastrous to both parties, and scarcely more to one than the other. An old man who forms a union with a young girl scarce out of her teens--or even younger--can scarcely have any very elevated motive for his action, and he certainly exposes himself to the greatest risk of sudden death, while insuring his premature decay. A king once characterized such a course as "the pleasantest form of suicide." It is doubtless suicidal, but we suspect there are some phases of such an unnatural union which are not very enjoyable. One reason of the great danger of such marriages to the old is the exhaustive effects of the sexual act. As previously noted, in some animals it causes immediate death. Dr. Acton makes the following pertinent remarks:-- "So serious, indeed, is the paroxysm of the nervous system produced by the sexual spasm, that its immediate effect is not always unattended with danger, and men with weak hearts have died in the act. Every now and then we learn that men are found dead on the night of their wedding." "However exceptional these cases are, they are warnings, and should serve to show that an act which _may_ destroy the weak should not be tampered with, even by the strong." "There are old men who marry young wives, and who pay the penalty by becoming martyrs to paralysis, softening of the brain, and driveling idiocy." Dr. Gardner quotes the Abbe Maury, as follows: "I hold as certain that after fifty years of age a man of sense ought to renounce the pleasures of love. Each time that he allows himself this gratification is _a pellet of earth thrown upon his coffin_."