“Bountiful nature,” writes _Mantegazza_, regarding woman at this sexual epoch, “sends to woman an ingenious engineer, who enlarges the hills to mountains and fills up the valleys with a soft alluvium of fat. The commencing wrinkles disappear, being smoothed out under the beneficial influence of this plastic material; the slender, elastic palm-tree stems are converted into majestic columns of Parian marble; quality is replaced by quantity, and if the eye has lost a few provinces, the hand has gained just as many. * * * A certain number of chosen women understand how to preserve for as long as ten years the unstable equilibrium of the period which separates these two ages of life. There are divine beings who with every oscillation of their tresses or rocking of their hips, with every undulation of their bosom, every serpentine movement of their limbs, instil desire. * * * They constitute our most intense delight, and our intensest torment, they make our life a blessing or a curse, they are the uttermost goal of human passion, of human voluptuous desire.” [Illustration: FIG. 51.—Female internal genital organs in the fully developed state. (From Toldt: Atlas of Human Anatomy.—Rebman Company, New York.) ] Among the injuries to beauty effected by pregnancy, one above all evident to the eye is the almost invariably ensuing change in the skin, principally taking the form of a change in pigmentation, with the appearance of spots varying in size and tint, on the face and especially on the lips and the forehead; there is greatly increased pigmentation also of the areola mammæ and the linea alba, and in addition of the labia majora and minora and of the anal region. It is not certain whether this chloasma uterinum is dependent, as _Jeamin_ assumes, on the discontinuance of menstruation, or, as _Virchow_ believes, on changes in the blood and the blood-pressure. Sometimes also, in pregnant women, we observe on the face, chiefly on the nose and the cheeks, dilatations of the small cutaneous vessels, often associated with acne nodules. A permanent disfigurement is caused by the _lineæ_ (vel _striæ_) _albicantes_, white lines or streaks of varying length and resembling scar tissue in appearance on the skin of the abdomen, the adjoining parts of the buttocks and thighs, the lower part of the front of the thorax, and the mammæ. They are not true scars, not being new formations of connective tissue, being on the contrary dependent on solutions of continuity, on relative diminution, that is to say, of the connective tissue layer of the skin. They are formed in consequence of the fact that the connective tissue bundles are not able to keep pace in their superficial enlargement with the necessarily rapid extension of the cutis, hence great meshes appear in the former, situate in the direction of the greatest tension of the skin. (_Spietschka_ and _Grünfeld_).