[346] W. Xavier Sudduth, “A Study in the Psycho-physics of Masturbation,” Chicago Medical Recorder, March, 1898.  Haig, who reaches a similar conclusion, has sought to find its precise mechanism in the blood-pressure.  “As the sexual act produces lower and falling blood-pressure,” he remarks, “it will of necessity relieve conditions which are due to high and rising blood-pressure, such, for instance, as mental depression and bad temper; and, unless my observation deceives me, we have here a connection between conditions of high blood-pressure with mental and bodily depression and acts of masturbation, for this act will relieve these conditions and tend to be practiced for this purpose.” (Uric Acid, 6th edition, p. 154.)

[347] Northcote discusses the classic attitude towards masturbation, Christianity and Sex Problems, p. 233.

[348] El Ktab, traduction de Paul de Regla, Paris, 1893.

[349] Remy de Gourmont, Physique de l’Amour, p. 133.

[350] Tillier, L’Instinct Sexuel, Paris, 1889, p. 270.

[351] G. Hirth, Wege zur Heimat, p. 648.

[352] Fere, in the course of his valuable work, L’Instinct Sexuel, stated that my conclusion is that masturbation is normal, and that “l’indulgence s’impose.”  I had, however, already guarded myself against this misinterpretation.

APPENDIX A.

THE INFLUENCE OF MENSTRUATION ON THE POSITION OF WOMEN.

A question of historical psychology which, so far as I know, has never been fully investigated is the influence of menstruation in constituting the emotional atmosphere through which men habitually view women.[353] I do not purpose to deal fully with this question, because it is one which may be more properly dealt with at length by the student of culture and by the historian, rather than from the standpoint of empirical psychology.  It is, moreover, a question full of complexities in regard to which it is impossible to speak with certainty.  But we here strike on a factor of such importance, such neglected importance, for the proper understanding of the sexual relations of men and women, that it cannot be wholly ignored.

Among the negroes of Surinam a woman must live in solitude during the time of her period; it is dangerous for any man or woman to approach her, and when she sees a person coming near she cries out anxiously:  “Mi kay!  Mi kay!”—­I am unclean!  I am unclean!  Throughout the world we find traces of the custom of which this is a typical example, but we must not too hastily assume that this custom is evidence of the inferior position occupied by semi-civilized women.  It is necessary to take a broad view, not only of the beliefs of semi-civilized man regarding menstruation, but of his general beliefs regarding the supernatural forces of the world.

There is no fragment of folk-lore so familiar to the European world as that which connects woman with the serpent.  It is, indeed, one of the foundation stones of Christian theology.[354] Yet there is no fragment of folk-lore which remains more obscure.  How has it happened that in all parts of the world the snake or his congeners, the lizard and the crocodile, have been credited with some design, sinister or erotic, on women?