each sex, then the beard in man, the breasts in woman, etc).
=Castration. Correlative sexual characters.=--Castration is the term
applied to the extirpation of the sexual glands. When it takes place
in infancy it causes a considerable change in the whole subsequent
development of the body, especially in man, but also in woman. Man
becomes more slender, preserves a high and infantile voice, and his
sexual correlative characters develop incompletely or not at all.
_Eunuchs_ are men castrated, usually in infancy. To ensure more safety
in their harems the Orientals not only remove the testicles but also
the penis. Bullocks and horses are bulls and stallions castrated at an
early age, and can be distinguished at first sight from normal males.
Females who have undergone castration become fat and sometimes take on
certain masculine characters. Male human eunuchs have a high-pitched
voice, a narrow chest; they remain beardless or nearly so, and have an
effeminate character, often intriguing. In both sexes there is a
tendency to neurosis and degeneration. It is a mistake to qualify the
peculiarities of the male eunuch in the terms of female peculiarities;
there is only a relative tendency. The eunuch is no more a woman than
a bullock is a cow.
The characters of castrated individuals are due only to ablation of
the sexual glands themselves--the testicles in man and the ovary in
woman; mutilation of other sexual organs, internal or external, such
as the penis, womb, etc., produces no result of this kind. It would
even appear to result from recent experiments that reimplantation of a
sexual gland in any part of the body is sufficient to arrest the
production of the special peculiarities of the eunuch.
All these facts, almost inexplicable hitherto, become comprehensible
by the aid of the engraphia of the mnemic energies. (Vide above;
_Semon_). The sexual glands, being of undifferentiated origin, contain
the energies of both sexes. The ecphoria of one of them provokes that
of its correlative characters and excludes that of the characters of
the other. If ecphoria of the sexual glands is arrested by castration
before it is finished, this paralyzes the predominance of that of its
corresponding correlative characters and reestablishes a kind of
intermediate or undifferentiated equilibrium between the ecphorias of
the correlative hereditary sexual characters of the two sexes.
On the other hand, if the sexual glands of an adult a
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