so also must we be cautious in our
assignment of moral motives for the sexual abstinence of young men of
this nature.[112]

In the female sex, also, there are persons in whom the sexual life, and
especially the sexual impulse, awakens very late. This may happen
notwithstanding the fact that menstruation has begun at the normal age.
Both the peripheral phenomena of detumescence, and also the phenomena of
contrectation, may be thus retarded; and the former especially may
permanently fail to appear. We see girls who appear remarkably virtuous,
because, while other girls are rejoicing at having found an admirer,
they pass coldly along, in the streets and elsewhere, their eyes
directed forwards, and rigidly avoid exchanging glances with any male
person. Although this delayed sexual development does not arouse in us
the same unsympathetic feelings in the case of young women as it does in
the case of young men, it is none the less necessary to recognise the
phenomenon in the female sex as well, and this not on medical grounds
merely, but also on educational, ethical, and social grounds. In fine,
in such cases, we have to do with something very different from cases in
which from a true sense of shame or on moral grounds a girl maintains
her mental and bodily chastity; different, also, from the cases in which
we have to do with women whose bodily development is normal, but who in
other respects resemble rather the type of those in whom the
reproductive glands have been removed.

I may take this opportunity of insisting upon the fact that the unduly
retarded awakening of the sexual life, or the complete failure of the
sexual impulse to appear, is not especially to be desired, and entails
dangers and disadvantages just as does a premature development of
sexuality. I may recall, in this connexion, certain earlier experiences.
At one time it was assumed that there was a mental disorder known as
pyromania; the pyromaniac was one with an irresistible impulse to light
incendiary fires. To-day, we no longer admit the existence of any such
disease, and the impulse to light incendiary fires, when such a morbid
impulse manifests itself, is regarded as a symptom of imbecility, of
cerebral degeneration, &c. But we may take this opportunity of reminding
the reader that Henke,[113] an earlier investigator, regarded pyromania
as due chiefly to arrest or disturbance of the physical and psychical
phenomena of puberty. Esquirol himself appears t