In the very simplest organism of inferior animals every desire of love ceases when age, disease or a wound has exhausted the energy of the genital organs. In man, instead, the most irresistible and bestial needs are so teeming with psychical elements of the moral and the intellectual world as to survive the disease of the organ. An innocent man loves even without being aware of his manhood, and a woman can die of love although knowing nothing of the existence of the womb. True it is, no amorous note arises in the eunuch, or if the phantoms of a strange lasciviousness are noticed wandering here and there, they are specters that belong to the limbo of the most transcendent pathology. These poor pariahs of nature are, however, very rare; while our rachitic civilization makes by hundreds the semi-eunuchs who fill with cuckoldly ornaments the sanctuary of the family and the low world of wandering loves. Statistics, fortunately, cannot obtain the exact number of these "half-men" and consign them to their inexorable files; be it enough for us to know that they are many, very many, much more numerous than feminine virtue and patience could tolerate. Nature's whole love, true love, nude but innocent love, is not all sentiment or thought, but also a function of reproductive life, a need of the senses. Martyrs and saints could mutilate themselves and die in the beatitude of their mutilations; but the majority of men does not consist of saints or martyrs. Every mutilation of love is a shame and the most fecund generator of many other minor shames. In the chaste and cool dawn of early youth, more than one woman consented unwittingly to an infamous compact by which a man offered her a great name and great wealth in exchange for a "yes." The wretched man loved her, desired her, but could not possess her as nature commanded man to possess woman; he wished to own the temple and feel the emotion of owning it without having the right to enter it. Sometimes the eunuch was not an abject being and did confess his shame before his betrayal, but the innocent maiden did not understand and accepted the compact. And who does not believe himself a hero or a martyr at that age? And the eunuch embraced his precious prey, inundated her with sterile kisses, and endeavored to warm her with his impotent caresses; and the marmoreal statue of adolescent virginity trembled with new and, to her, incomprehensible emotions. Later on, the virgin realized that she was a woman, that in vain she was a woman, and love attacked and seized virtue, and felled it despairing and imploring, and the covenant sworn in good faith was broken by the most powerful of affections. How many domestic misfortunes, what a fruitful stream of bastards, how many brigands spring from this contaminated source!