t the celebrated Astruc wrote his
treatise on female diseases, near the end of the seventeenth
century,--who felt compelled by the extreme modesty of the people in
this particular--but who, outside of medicine, were about as virtuous as
the average Tabby or Tom cats in the midnight hour--to write the chapter
touching on nymphomania in Latin, so as not to shock the morbidly
sensitive modesty of the French nobility, who then enjoyed _Le Droit de
cuissage_,--down through to Bienville, who wrote the first extended work
on nymphomania, and Tissot, who first broached the subject and the
danger of Onanism, all have felt that they must stop on the threshold
and "apologize." Tissot, however, seemed to possess a robust and a plain
Hippocratic mind, and as he apologized he could not help but see the
ridiculousness of so doing, as in the preface to his work we find the
following: "Shall we remain silent on so important a subject? By no
means. The sacred authors, the Fathers of the Church, who present their
thoughts in living words, and ecclesiastical authors have not felt that
silence was best. I have followed their example, and shall exclaim, with
St. Augustine, 'If what I have written scandalizes any prudish persons,
let them rather accuse the turpitude of their own thoughts than the
words I have been obliged to use.'"

For my part, I think that people who can go to the theatre and enjoy "As
in a Looking-Glass," and witness some of the satyrical or billy-goat
traits of humanity so graphically exhibited in "La Tosca," with evident
satisfaction; or attend the more robust plays of "Virginius" or of
"Galba, the Gladiator," with all its suggestions of the Caesarian
section, and the lust and the fornications of an intensely animal Roman
empress, without the destruction of their moral equilibrium or tending
to induce in them a disposition to commit a rape on the first met,--I
think such people can be safely intrusted to read this book.

And as to the reading public, there are but few general readers who
could honestly plead an ignorance of the "Decameron," Balzac, La
Fontaine, "Heptameron," Crebillon _fils_, or of matter-of-fact Monsieur
le Docteur Maitre Rabelais,--works which, more or less, carry a moral
instruction in every tale, which, like the tales of the "Malice of
Women," in the unexpurged edition of the literal translation of the
"Arabian Nights," contains much more of practical moral lessons, even if
in the flowery and warm,