n to do so by intense action of the
ganglionic nerves, whose connection with the brain, though real, is much
less direct. Were it not so, life would be much more precarious than it
is, and advance in civilization impossible; because the necessarily
incessant activity of the nerves involved in nutritive processes would
too largely impair the action of the brain. The effect on the brain of a
really irresistible and predominant activity of the nerves involved in
the reproductive organs, is to be studied in the lower animals, and in
phenomena that, fortunately, are rarely to be observed in healthy
individuals of the human race. Still less can such confessedly morbid
predominance be considered as a peculiar liability of the female sex in
this race. A singular tendency exists in many quarters, and is strongly
manifested in Dr. Clarke's book, to assume that considerations
pertaining to sex and to the functions of reproduction exercise such an
enormous influence upon one sex, and none at all upon the other. Since
the discovery in 1827 of the ovule or female reproductive cell, there
can be no question of the complete physiological equivalence and analogy
between the essential organs of reproduction in the two sexes. The
period of their development, the influence of such development on the
entire nutrition of the body, the irregularities of nutritive or of
cerebro-spinal action, that may be caused by irregularities in such
development, are also completely analogous. It is only the organ of
gestation that is peculiar to the female--the organ of maternity--the
function that, although resulting from sex, transcends sex and belongs
to the race. In a double sense is the uterus secondary to the
ovaries.[41] For its physiological action, both in menstruation and in
pregnancy, is the direct consequence of ovarian functions, and closely
dependent upon them; and the period of its prominent activity does not
come until after the action of the ovaries has been completely
established; that is, the period of maternity is, or should be,
consecutive to the period of adolescence, and the work of gestation only
entered upon when the work of ovulation has long been thoroughly
accomplished.

The analogies have been much overstrained that exist between the
menstrual epoch of an adolescent girl and the pregnancy of an adult
woman. They are illustrations of a general physiological law that in
some cases might be called a caprice of nature, in virtue of