Now that we have made ourselves acquainted with the various use to which the Ancients put the genital organs, we are confronted inevitably with the question,—how were the genitals themselves affected by it all? Impossible to suppose they can have preserved their integrity absolutely intact, while at the same time such parts as were substituted in use for the one or the other form of them, were exposed,—as is abundantly proved by the different diseases described, diseases affecting the _pathic_, the _fellator_ and the _cunnilingue_ respectively,—to manifold complaints, and very often had to pay severely for the misuse to which they were put. Granting that the unnatural use of the mouth and the rectum must necessarily have endangered those parts specifically more than the penis, an organ particularly adapted and intended for friction, still this will by no means imply the entire immunity of the latter from ill effects. Indeed the fact of such immunity is sufficiently disproved by the passages quoted specifically under paederastia, without taking into account at all the large number of actual maladies of the genitals that are mentioned by professional and non-professional writers of Antiquity. With some of these we have already made acquaintance,—maladies which no one would for a moment think of ascribing _exclusively_ to the practice of the vice of paederastia. Accordingly we must look for other factors, which being in part unconnected with the use of the genitals, are not like this to be regarded as an immediately efficient cause, but rather as predisposing circumstances, exercising from the first an independent influence on the normal condition of those organs. For mere use or misuse cannot possibly be taken as in itself a sufficient reason to account for disease, even though the Ancients may have looked upon complaints of the genitals partly as a direct consequence of _illicita Venus_ (unlawful Love), or in other words as it were a result of the vengeance of outraged Nature. The genitals, like all organs of the human body, exhibit over and above their functional activity on behalf of the general organism and its reproduction, evidences also of an independent activity directed towards the maintenance of their own integrity and individual existence,—and these are bound to differ more or less according to difference of locality and difference of time, as indeed may be predicated of the organism as a whole, if we trust the indications it gives.