M. Pierre Janet mentions the case of a woman in whom “the family feelings, the affective emotions, modesty, and the sensitiveness of the genital organs appeared and disappeared simultaneously.” He adds: “Which of these phenomena brings the others in its train? Is genital sensibility a centre round which other psychological syntheses are constructed? I draw no conclusion.”—_État mental des Hystériques_, i. pp. 217, 218. If from the organic, motor, and vaso-motor manifestations we pass to the nervous centres, where impressions are received and movements initiated, we can find scarcely anything but hypotheses. One point only has been fixed since Budge’s researches: the existence in the spinal cord of a centre or an area on the level of the fourth lumbar vertebra, which governs the movements of the sexual act. Its psychological function is slight or non-existent: it is properly an instinctive centre, whose action is not obstructed by the removal of the cerebral hemispheres and the cerebellum, in the inferior vertebrates, and even in the dog, as proved by the experiments of Goltz and others. Some authors admit, without precise localisation, a second centre, situated near the ganglia at the base of the encephalon, which they suppose to be the seat of the brute sensations and their corresponding movements, and in relation with the centres of olfactory and visual sensations. This centre would have a psychological value. Lastly, a third and last centre in the cortical layer, the organ of perception properly so called, and of the revival of images. Nothing precise is known as to its position, whether it is localised in a certain area, or diffused. On this point we find nothing but hypotheses—if so much as that. The occipital lobes, the neighbourhood of the olfactory centre, have been suggested, but these are extremely doubtful. We have to be content with the admission that, from the genital organs, impressions are first transmitted to the lower or spinal centre, which exercises a reflex action on the corresponding systems of vascular, motor, and secretory innervation, and thence—whether there is an intermediate centre, or not—reach the cerebral cortex, where they produce a more or less definite state of consciousness, according to circumstances.