d is built up on the general fact
that the intimate contact of the male and female who have chosen each
other is mutually pleasurable. Below this general fact is the more
specific fact that in the normal accomplishment of the act of sexual
consummation the two partners experience the acute gratification of
simultaneous orgasm. Herein, it has been said, lies the secret of love. It
is the very basis of love, the condition of the healthy exercise of the
sexual functions, and, in many cases, it seems probable, the condition
also of fertilization.

Even savages in a very low degree of culture are sometimes
patient and considerate in evoking and waiting for the signs of
sexual desire in their females. (I may refer to the significant
case of the Caroline Islanders, as described by Kubary in his
ethnographic study of that people and quoted in volume iv of
these _Studies_, "Sexual Selection in Man," Sect. III.) In
Catholic days theological influence worked wholesomely in the
same direction, although the theologians were so keen to detect
the mortal sin of lust. It is true that the Catholic insistence
on the desirability of simultaneous orgasm was largely due to the
mistaken notion that to secure conception it was necessary that
there should be "insemination" on the part of the wife as well as
of the husband, but that was not the sole source of the
theological view. Thus Zacchia discusses whether a man ought to
continue with his wife until she has the orgasm and feels
satisfied, and he decides that that is the husband's duty;
otherwise the wife falls into danger either of experiencing the
orgasm during sleep, or, more probably, by self-excitation, "for
many women, when their desires have not been satisfied by coitus,
place one thigh on the other, pressing and rubbing them together
until the orgasm occurs, in the belief that if they abstain from
using the hands they have committed no sin." Some theologians, he
adds, favor that belief, notably Hurtado de Mendoza and Sanchez,
and he further quotes the opinion of the latter that women who
have not been satisfied in coitus are liable to become hysterical
or melancholic (_Zacchiae Quaestionum Medico-legalium Opus_, lib.
vii, tit. iii, quaest. VI). In the same spirit some theologians
seem to have permitted _irrumatio_ (without ejaculation), so long
as it is only the preli