ntenance and actions. Only in sickness or prolonged
journeys are they allowed any strong foods--meats, eggs, etc.--or any
alcohol."

[101] Fere, _L'Instinct Sexuel_, second edition, p. 332.

[102] Rural life, as we have seen when discussing its relation to sexual
precocity, _is_ on one side the reverse of a safeguard against sexual
influences. But, on the other hand, in so far as it involves hard work and
simple living under conditions that are not nervously stimulating, it is
favorable to a considerably delayed sexual activity in youth and to a
relative continence. Ammon, in the course of his anthropological
investigations of Baden conscripts, found that sexual intercourse was rare
in the country before twenty, and even sexual emissions during sleep rare
before nineteen or twenty. It is said, also, he repeats, that no one has a
right to run after girls who does not yet carry a gun, and the elder lads
sometimes brutally ill-treat any younger boy found going about with a
girl. No doubt this is often preliminary to much license later.

[103] The numerical preponderance which celibate women teachers have now
gained in the American school system has caused much misgiving among many
sagacious observers, and is said to be unsatisfactory in its results on
the pupils of both sexes. A distinguished authority, Professor McKeen
Cattell ("The School and the Family," _Popular Science Monthly_, Jan.,
1909), referring to this preponderance of "devitalized and unsexed
spinsters," goes so far as to say that "the ultimate result of letting the
celibate female be the usual teacher has been such as to make it a
question whether it would not be an advantage to the country if the whole
school plant could be scrapped."

[104] Corre (_Les Criminels_, p. 351) mentions that of thirteen priests
convicted of crime, six were guilty of sexual attempts on children, and of
eighty-three convicted lay teachers, forty-eight had committed similar
offenses. This was at a time when lay teachers were in practice almost
compelled to live a celibate life; altered conditions have greatly
diminished this class of offense among them. Without going so far as
crime, many moral and religious men, clergymen and others, who have led
severely abstinent lives in youth, sometimes experience in middle age or
later the eruption of almost uncontrollable sexual impulses, normal or
abnormal. In women such manifestations are apt to take the form of
obsessional thoughts of s