ting). Certainly this is the process as observed
in horses, cattle, goats, etc., and it seems likely something
analogous is natural in man."

While it is easily possible to carry to excess a view which would
make the woman rather than the man the active agent in coitus
(and it may be recalled that in the Cebidae the penis, as also the
clitoris, is furnished with a bone), there is probably an element
of truth in the belief that the vagina shares in the active part
which, there can now be little doubt, is played by the uterus in
detumescence. Such a view certainly enables us to understand how
it is that semen effused on the exterior sexual organs can be
conveyed to the uterus.

It was indeed the failure to understand the vital activity of the
semen and the feminine genital canal, co-operating together
towards the junction of sperm cell and germ cell, which for so
long stood in the way of the proper understanding of conception.
Even the genius of Harvey, which had grappled successfully with
the problem of the circulation, failed in the attempt to
comprehend the problem of generation. Mainly on account of this
difficulty, he was unable to see how the male element could
possibly enter the uterus, although he devoted much observation
and study to the question. Writing of the uterus of the doe after
copulation, he says: "I began to doubt, to ask myself whether the
semen of the male could by any possibility make its way by
attraction or injection to the seat of conception, and repeated
examination led me to the conclusion that none of the semen
reached this seat." (_De-Generatione Animalium_, Exercise lxvii.)
"The woman," he finally concluded, "after contact with the
spermatic fluid _in coitu_, seems to receive an influence and
become fecundated without the co-operation of any sensible
corporeal agent, in the same way as iron touched by the magnet is
endowed with its powers."

Although the specifically sexual muscular process of detumescence in
women--as distinguished from the general muscular phenomena of sexual
excitement which may be fairly obvious--is thus seen to be somewhat
complex and obscure, in women as well as in men detumescence is a
convulsion which discharges a slowly accumulated store of nervous force.
In women also, as in men, the motor discharge is directed to a specific
end--the introm