race.
The real reason, afterward found, was a mixture of pure humanitarianism
and Malthusianism boiled down to Hottentot ethics. With them a monorchid
was not supposed to beget twins; when twins are born in the family, the
mother generally smothers the female, if one happens to be such; if not,
then the feeblest of the two is sacrificed. In their migratory and
nomadic life the mother finds it impossible to either carry or care for
the two children. The male Hottentot, rather than have any avoidable
infanticide in his family, or that his wife should go through and suffer
the annoyance and pangs of an unnecessary and unprofitable pregnancy,
generously has one testicle removed; this is something that the ordinary
civilized white man would not do, even if his legitimate wife and all
his outside concubines were to have twins or triplets every nine months;
so that, even as strange as it may appear, civilization must need go to
the wild Bushmen in search of that grand old Quixotic chivalry that was
in ancient times always ready to sacrifice itself for the welfare of
woman.

The old Greek and Roman statues, representing the gods and athletes of
ancient Greece and Rome, are a puzzle to many, owing to the diminutive
and phimosed virile organ that the artists have attached to them. Galen
represents that the disuse of the organ by the athletes was the cause
of its undeveloped form, and that as the organ of these did not figure
in the worship of Venus, or participate in the festivals of Bacchus, but
was used solely and simply for micturating purposes, impotence was often
the result, citing the case of a patient who came to consult him for an
obstinate priapism resulting from venereal excess, who met, in his
anteroom, an athlete who was being treated for the opposite condition,
due to the too rigid continence to which he had been for years
subjected. Acton does not believe that continued continence has that
effect, quoting Dr. Bergeret, who had long been physician to a number of
religious societies, as saying that he had never seen serious troubles
of the organs of generation in these communities, which denotes that if
they indulged in proper fasting and prayer they were in the same
condition of flaccid impotence as the athlete in Galen's anteroom. Louis
VII, of France, tried fasting and prayer in connection with rigid
continence, and, as a result, his wife, Queen Eleonore, was divorced
from him and married Henry II, of England, who