Children are common objects of love and hope for both parents. Life and health are ever changing the relations of our surroundings, and when newly-married people put off to the dim future the hopes of rearing a family, they are often doomed to everlasting disappointment. Nature is capricious and jealous of her prerogatives, and those who trifle with her functions must expect to be frustrated in the end, and have no one but themselves to blame if she fails to respond to their capricious wishes. Children make trouble of course, so were we as troublesome in our time, but there is also a great deal of pleasure in watching them grow from day to day in bodily strength and mental perception, which no amount of selfish enjoyment can compensate. The diseases that are brought upon women by the different practices and mechanical devices to prevent conception are too numerous to mention in a work of this character. Some of the methods are absolutely loathesome to all sense of decency and reduce sexual intercourse much below the instinctive indulgence of the brute; these debauches of the conjugal bed not only sap the vitality of the participants, but must lower or destroy all mutual respect, and ultimate in dissension and strife, which the divorce court will finally assuage. Referring to the practice of conjugal onanism or interrupted or incomplete coitus, Dr. Franklin Devay says: “However, it is not difficult to conceive the degree of perturbation that a like practice should exert upon the genital system of woman by provoking desires which are not gratified; a profound stimulation is felt through the entire apparatus; the uterus, Fallopian tubes and ovaries enter into a state of orgasm, a storm which is not appeased by the natural crisis; a nervous super-excitation persists. There occurs, then, what would take place if, presenting food to a famished man, one should snatch it from his mouth after having thus violently excited his appetite. The sensibilities of the womb and the entire reproductive system are teased for no purpose. It is to this cause, too often repeated, that we should attribute the multiple _neuroses_, those strange affections which originate in the genital system of women. Our conviction respecting them is based upon a great number of observations. Furthermore, the normal relations existing between the married couple undergo unfortunate changes; this affection, formed upon reciprocal esteem, is little by little effaced by the repetition of an act which pollutes the marriage bed; from thence proceed certain hard feelings, certain deep impressions, which, gradually growing, eventuate in the scandalous ruptures of which the community rarely know the real motive.” This is in every respect as hurtful as the vicious practice of solitary vice, although that is comparatively less common among young virgins than among those of the opposite sex. Nevertheless, this is a frequent cause of hysterical symptoms and uterine disease.