in the community was also a force.  Masturbation was unknown, and no irregular relations took place with persons outside the community.  The practice was maintained for thirty years, and was finally abandoned, not on its demerits, but in deference to the opinions of the outside world.  Mr. Miller admitted that the practice became more difficult in ordinary marriage, which favors a more mechanical habit of intercourse.  The information received from Mr. Miller is supplemented in a pamphlet entitled Male Continence (the name given to coitus reservatus in the community), written in 1872 by the founder, John Humphrey Noyes.  The practice is based, he says, on the fact that sexual intercourse consists of two acts, a social and a propagative, and that if propagation is to be scientific there must be no confusion of these two acts, and procreation must never be involuntary.  It was in 1844, he states, that this idea occurred to him as a result of a resolve to abstain from sexual intercourse in consequence of his wife’s delicate health and inability to bear healthy children, and in his own case he found the practice “a great deliverance.  It made a happy household.”  He points out that the chief members of the Oneida community “belonged to the most respectable families in Vermont, had been educated in the best schools of New England morality and refinement, and were, by the ordinary standards, irreproachable in their conduct so far as sexual matters are concerned, till they deliberately commenced, in 1846, the experiment of a new state of society, on principles which they had been long maturing and were prepared to defend before the World.”  In relation to male continence, therefore, Noyes thought the community might fairly be considered “the Committee of Providence to test its value in actual life.”  He states that a careful medical comparison of the statistics of the community had shown that the rate of nervous disease in the community was considerably below the average outside, and that only two cases of nervous disorder had occurred which could be traced with any probability to a misuse of male continence.  This has been confirmed by Van de Warker, who studied forty-two women of the community without finding any undue prevalence of reproductive diseases, nor could he find any diseased condition attributable to the sexual habits of the community (cf.  C. Reed, Text-Book of Gynecology, 1901, p. 9).

Noyes believed that “male continence” had never previously been a definitely recognized practice based on theory, though there might have been occasional approximation to it.  This is probably true if the coitus is reservatus in the full sense, with complete absence of emission.  Prolonged coitus, however, permitting the woman to have orgasm more than once, while the man has none, has long been recognized.  Thus in the seventeenth century Zacchia discussed whether such a practice is legitimate (Zacchiae Quaestionum Opus,