atavistic or retrogressive genius, which is imitative and which always
enunciates dead and obsolete matter long since abandoned and thrown
aside as being utterly useless. The doctrines of communism and of
nihilism are the products of retrogressive genius and are clearly
atavistic, inasmuch as they are a reversion to the mental habitudes of
our savage ancestors. The doctrines of the matriarchate are likewise
degenerate beliefs, and, if held by any civilized being of to-day, are
evidences of psychic atavism.

Atavism invariably attacks the weak; and individuals of neurasthenic
type are more frequently its victims than are any other class of people.
Especially is this true in the case of those who suffer from psychical
atavism.

The woman of to-day who believes in and inculcates the doctrines of
matriarchy, doctrines which have been, as far as the civilized world is
concerned, thrown aside and abandoned these many hundred years, is as
much the victim of psychic atavism as was Alice Mitchell, who slew Freda
Ward in Memphis several years ago, and who was justly declared a
viragint by the court that tried her.

Without entering into the truthfulness or falseness of the theory
advanced by me elsewhere in this book, in regard to the primal cause of
psychic hermaphroditism, which I attributed and do still attribute to
psychic atavism, I think that I am perfectly safe in asserting that
every woman who has been at all prominent in advancing the cause of
equal rights in its entirety, has either given evidences or
masculo-femininity (viraginity), or has shown, conclusively, that she
was the victim of psycho-sexual aberrancy. Moreover, the history of
every viragint of any note in the history of the world shows that they
were either physically or psychically degenerate, or both.

Jeanne d'Arc was the victim of hystero-epilepsy, while Catharine the
Great was a dipsomaniac, and a creature of unbounded and inordinate
sensuality. Messalina, the depraved wife of Claudius, a woman of
masculine type, whose very form embodied and shadowed forth the regnant
idea of her mind--absolute and utter rulership--was a woman of such
gross carnality, that her lecherous conduct shocked even the depraved
courtiers of her lewd and salacious court. The side-lights of history,
as Douglas Campbell has so cleverly pointed out in his "Puritan in
Holland, England, and America," declare that there is every reason to
believe that the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth of