But a question of such paramount importance should not be sacrificed to any false and prudish notions of delicacy; I shall therefore offer such observations, as I may think calculated to check the progress of a vice, that has done more to demoralize the human mind than the whole catalogue of existing causes besides. It may be deemed an exaggeration, when it is stated that full three fourths of the insane owe their malady to the effects of masturbation: but the assertion is corroborated by one of the first writers on medical jurisprudence, and is fully borne out by the daily experience of proprietors of lunatic asylums. The practice of self-abuse usually has its origin in boarding-schools, and other places where young persons congregate in numbers; and there are few of us who may have observed the vice practised, although it may be unpleasant to avow as much, that could resist the contamination. “One sickly sheep infects the flock, And poisons all the rest.” And thus it is, though ninety-and-nine be pure and spotless as the driven snow, if the hundredth be immoral, the poison is soon disseminated, and the whole flock become initiated into a vice, which, if indulged in, will blast their intellectual faculties, and probably consign them as outcasts of society; rendering them slavering idiots, or the inmates of a lunatic asylum. It is not only in private schools that this sin rages, our public foundations and colleges are not exempt from it. The heads of our universities are particularly scrupulous in driving from their neighborhood the frail fair, lest they should contaminate the votaries of learning; while a vice far more degrading in its practice, and infinitely more baneful in its effects, rages within the very sanctuaries of classic lore. Many a brilliant genius has sunk into fatuity beneath its degrading influence. Loss of memory, idiocy, blindness,[15] total impotence, nervous debility, paralysis, strangury, &c., are among the unerring consequences of an indulgence in this criminal passion. I need not bring a greater proof of the dire effects of an indulgence in the practice of masturbation, than the deplorable state of mind to which it reduced one of our greatest poets. The treatment of this delusive and mentally annihilating propensity, falls equally within the province of the philosopher and the physician. Without a total abandonment of the practice, the case is hopeless; and he to whom the consequences shall have been portrayed and heeds them not, is unworthy of our sympathy, but deserves the evils he entails upon himself.