Are We a Declining Race ? 



could take its melancholy victims with me in my 

 daily rounds, and could point out to them the 

 awful consequences which they do but little 

 suspect to be the result of its indulgence. I could 

 show them those gifted by nature with high 

 talents, and fitted to be an ornament and a 

 benefit to society, sunk into such a state of physical 

 and moral degradation as wrings the heart to 

 witness, and still preserving with the last 

 remnant of a mind gradually sinking into 

 fatuity, the consciousness that their hopeless 

 wretchedness is the just reward of their own 

 misconduct." 



Copland's " Dictionary of Medicine," Vol. II., 

 p. 492, thus deals with " Exciting Causes of In- 

 sanity " : " Whatever exhausts organic nervous 

 power both predisposes to and directly occasions 

 insanity. Many of these causes which thus affect 

 nervous energy, favour congestion of the brain, 

 and occasion disease of the vital organs, tend- 

 ing to disorder the functions of the brain 

 sympathetically. Of these the most influential 

 are masturbation and libertinism, or sexual 

 excess, sensuality in all its forms, and inordinate 

 indulgence in the use of intoxicating substances 

 and stimulants. The baneful influence of the 

 first of these causes is very much greater (in both 

 sexes), than is usually supposed, and is, I believe, 

 a growing evil. . . . It is even more pre- 

 valent in the female than in the male sex ; and 

 in the former it usually occasions various dis- 

 orders in connection with the sexual organs as 

 leucorrhoea, displacement of the uturus, difficult 

 or disordered or suppressed or profuse menstrua - 

 86 



