OF MENSTRUATION. 91 



I also have known several. Some continue to menstruate without 

 any inconvenience until fifty-five, sixty, sixty-five, and even seventy 

 years of age. Cases are related of persons who have lost them at 

 the usual period, and become regular again at eighty, ninety, ninety- 

 five, or, according to the report of Blancardi, even at one hundred 

 and five years of age. But, as M. Desormeaux remarks, although 

 these kinds of return are not rare at sixty, seventy, or seventy-five 

 years, it is at least certain they ought rather to be considered as the 

 sign of some disease, than as a real resumption of the menstrual func- 

 tion. However, in the fact itself, there is nothing which the laws 

 of the animal economy render incomprehensible. In the same man- 

 ner as certain plants sometimes flourish a second time in autumn, 

 after having been withered at the close of spring, so, also, a woman 

 may, under certain circumstances, return, as it were, to her young 

 age again, when she is just touching the decline of life. It is a last 

 effort of nature to restore a more prosperous season, but which 

 serves, unhappily, only to hasten a dissolution which she in vain 

 desires to retard. Thus it appears that, in the natural order, the 

 menses ought to cease between the fortieth and fiftieth years in our 

 temperate climes; between thirty and forty in warm climates, and 

 from forty-five to fifty under the colder zones: in other words, their 

 whole duration is, every where, near about thirty years; where they 

 are precocious they disappear sooner, and where their appearance 

 is more tardy they are also prolonged to a later period of life. All 

 cases that are in opposition to this general rule, ought, in my opi- 

 nion, to be registered as among the exceptions, or regarded as pa- 

 thological. 



225. The change of life (^age du rilour) is marked by the gradual 

 disappearance of the charms of puberty; the bosom and the cheeks 

 become flaccid, the skin is wrinkled, appears to be too large, and 

 loses its delicateness; the eyes sink in the orbits; the carnation of 

 the cheeks is supplanted by a yellowish tint; that empurpled blush 

 which once, amidst smiles, sat on her rosy lips, is chased away by a 

 bluish and leaden hue; every circumstance proclaims that the sea- 

 son of the pleasures is past, and that she can no longer rely on the 

 attractions peculiar to the sex. It is, therefore, very properly, that 

 this period is called the critical time, or critical age; but attempts 

 have been erroneously made to justify these epithets, by reference 

 to the numberless dangers with which, according to the general opi- 

 nion, women are at this period surrounded. In fact, the statistical 

 researches published by Moret and Finlayson, MM. Chateauneuf 

 and Lachaise, prove that not more women than men die between 

 the ages of forty and fifty years. Nevertheless, the menses rarely 



