lts are summarized in _Archives d'Anthropologie
Criminelle_, Sept., 1891. Alebrand of Florence, the French King's
physician in the thirteenth century, also advised intercourse a day after
the end of menstruation.

POSTSCRIPT.

"The work that I was born to do is done," a great poet wrote when at last
he had completed his task. And although I am not entitled to sing any
_Nunc dimittis_, I am well aware that the task that has occupied the best
part of my life can have left few years and little strength for any work
that comes after. It is more than thirty years ago since the first resolve
to write the work now here concluded began to shape itself, still dimly
though insistently; the period of study and preparation occupied over
fifteen years, ending with the publication of _Man and Woman_, put forward
as a prolegomenon to the main work which, in the writing and publication,
has occupied the fifteen subsequent years.

It was perhaps fortunate for my peace that I failed at the outset to
foresee all the perils that beset my path. I knew indeed that those who
investigate severely and intimately any subject which men are accustomed
to pass by on the other side lay themselves open to misunderstanding and
even obloquy. But I supposed that a secluded student who approached vital
social problems with precaution, making no direct appeal to the general
public, but only to the public's teachers, and who wrapped up the results
of his inquiries in technically written volumes open to few, I supposed
that such a student was at all events secure from any gross form of attack
on the part of the police or the government under whose protection he
imagined that he lived. That proved to be a mistake. When only one volume
of these _Studies_ had been written and published in England, a
prosecution, instigated by the government, put an end to the sale of that
volume in England, and led me to resolve that the subsequent volumes
should not be published in my own country. I do not complain. I am
grateful for the early and generous sympathy with which my work was
received in Germany and the United States, and I recognize that it has had
a wider circulation, both in English and the other chief languages of the
world, than would have been possible by the modest method of issue which
the government of my own country induced me to abandon. Nor has the effort
to crush my work resulted in any change in that work by so much as a
single word. With h