According to Westermark elderly men generally fall more easily in love with middle-aged women than with young girls. No doubt this is often the case when reason and love predominate, but it is necessary to avoid generalization, and it is curious to observe how often very old men become enamored of quite young girls, as the latter may fall in love with old men. It is common knowledge that young girls do not marry old graybeards solely for their money or their name. No doubt this is not uncommon, but I have often seen girls of eighteen or twenty fall in love with old _roués_, when money, name and position were theirs and not the man's. However, in such cases it is most often the old man who is amorous. Westermark maintains that this condition is not normal, and we shall see that very often it is a case of commencing _senile dementia_, a pathological cerebral condition in which the sexual appetite becomes suddenly revived. The love of a young girl for an old man may be explained by the intellectual superiority of the old man or by the absence of another object for love. It is often also due to hysteria and consequently pathological. In old age, when the sexual life of two conjoints is extinguished, there remains a purified love which colors the evening of their life with autumn tints. The modern detractors of marriage too often forget this phenomenon. No doubt the evening of conjugal life is often troubled with discord and sorrow, but then it is usually a question of "_mariage de convenance_," marriage for money or position, mutual misunderstanding, or irreflective amorous intoxication. Quarrels may also arise when pathological conditions become introduced into marriage. In woman, sexual ontogeny is not the same as in man. She matures earlier and more rapidly. In our race, a woman at eighteen is sexually mature; between eighteen and twenty-five she is in the best condition for sexual life; toward fifty the menopause occurs, and with it cessation of fecundity. Hence the period during which a woman is fecund is much shorter than in man and terminates much earlier. Owing to this, the development of the intellectual and sentimental irradiations of the sexual appetite in woman is more rapid than in man. A young girl is much more mature and full grown as regards her reproductive power than a young man. These phenomena extend to the whole mental life of woman, who is less capable of an ulterior development in old age than man, because she generally becomes settled and automatic much more rapidly than the latter. No doubt these phenomena are partly due to the defective mental education of women, but this explanation is insufficient. Here again we must distinguish the phylogenetic disposition of woman from the effects of education during her ontogenetic development.