tions and very great suffering to this cause.
The cases may occur at any period of life. We meet with them frequently
among such as are usually called, or think themselves, continent young
men. There are large classes of persons who seem to think that they
may, without moral guilt, excite their own feelings or those of others
by loose or libidinous conversation in society, provided such impure
thoughts or acts are not followed by masturbation or fornication. I
have almost daily to tell such persons that physically, and in a
sanitary point of view, they are ruining their constitutions. There
are young men who almost pass their lives in making carnal acquaintances
in the street, but just stop short of seducing girls; there are others
who haunt the lower classes of places of public amusement for the
purpose of sexual excitement, and live, in fact, a thoroughly immoral
life in all respects except actually going home with prostitutes. When
these men come to me, laboring under the various forms of impotence,
they are surprised at my suggesting to them the possibility of the
impairment of their powers being dependent upon these previous vicious
habits."[4]

[Footnote 4: Acton.]

"Those lascivious _day-dreams_ and amorous reveries, in which young
people--and especially the idle and the voluptuous, and the sedentary
and the nervous--are exceedingly apt to indulge, are often the sources
of general debility, effeminacy, disordered functions, premature
disease, and even premature death, without the actual exercise of the
genital organs! Indeed, this unchastity of thought--this adultery of
the mind--is the beginning of immeasurable evil to the human
family."[5]

[Footnote 5: Graham.]

Amativeness.--Certain phrenologists contend that the controlling
center of the sexual passion is the cerebellum, or little brain, which
is situated at the lower and back part of the head. They apparently
love to dwell upon the theme, and ride their hobby upon all possible
occasions, often in the most disgusting manner, and always leaving the
impression that they must be themselves suffering from perversion of
the very function of which they speak.

There may be some doubt whether the function called amativeness is
located in the cerebellum at all; at least, it is perfectly certain
that amativeness is not the exclusive function of the cerebellum. Says
Carpenter, the learned physiologist, "The seat of the sexual sensation
is no longer supposed to