Some females endure intense pain during coition, so as to occasion fainting or great exhaustion. Such suffering is usually traceable to internal ailments—such as _piles_, _fistulous_ _openings_ between the _rectum_ and _vagina_, _ulcerated wombs_, _vaginal tumors or abscesses_. Cases continually present themselves, where, on the removal of the cause, the effect is cured. The number of children that women have individually given birth to is very variable. It is attested, among a collection of facts of this nature, that one female gave birth to eighteen children at six births; another, forty-four children in all, thirty in the first marriage and fourteen in the second; and in a still more extraordinary case, fifty-three children in all, in one marriage, eighteen times single births, five times twins, four times triplets, once six, and once seven.[14] Men have been known to beget seventy or eighty children in two or more marriages. With regard to the average proportion of male and female births, it appears that the males predominate about four or five only in one hundred. The average number of children in each marriage is, in England, from five to seven. To a continual irritability of temper among females may be ascribed infertility. Independently of ever fostering domestic disquietude, it produces thinness and feeble health; and, where pregnancy does ensue, it most frequently provokes miscarriages, or leads to the birth of ill-conditioned and puny offspring. Perhaps one of the most indispensable and endearing qualifications of the feminine character is an amiable temper. Cold and callous must be the man who does not prize the meek and gentle spirit of a confiding woman. Her lips may not be sculptured in the line of perfect beauty, her eye may not roll in dazzling splendor, but if the native smile be ever ready to welcome, and the glance fraught with clinging devotion, or shrinking sensibility, she must be prized far above gold or rubies. A few moments of enduring silence would often prevent years of discord and unhappiness; but the keen retort and waspish argument too often break the chain of affection, link by link, and leave the heart with no tie to hold it but a cold and frigid duty. SECTION III. TREATMENT OF IMPOTENCE. IN venturing upon this part of the subject, it will be as well, first, to distinguish those cases that are curable from those that admit of no relief. Among the latter may be enumerated all those arising from an original or accidental defect in the organs of generation. Where, also, old age is the cause, little is to be done: medicines are of no avail, and temporary stimuli not unfrequently worse.