Page:Annie Besant, The Law of Population.djvu/37

The check we will take first in order is that to which Mr. Montagu Cookson alludes in his essay: he says that the family may be limited by "obedience to natural laws which all may discover and verify if they will." The "natural laws" to which Mr. Cookson refers would be, we imagine, the results of observation on the comparative fertility with women of some periods over others. It is well known that the menstrual discharge, or the Catamenia, recurs in normal cases at monthly intervals, during the whole of the fertile period of female life; a woman does not bear children before menstruation has commenced, nor after it has ceased. There are cases on record where women have borne children, but have never menstruated, but these are rare exceptions to the general rule; menstruation is the sign of capability of conception, as its cessation is the sign of future disability to conceive. Recent investigators have collected many cases in which "the menstrual period was evidently connected with the maturation and discharge of ova" (Carpenter). "The essential part of the female generative system," says Dr. Carpenter, "is that in which the ova [eggs] are prepared. . . . In the higher animals, as in the human female, the substance of the ovarium is firm and compact, and consists of a nucleated, tough, fibrous, connective tissue, with much interspersed fusiform muscular tissue, forming what is known as the stroma. . . . As development proceeds the cells. . . . multiply, and single cells or group of cells, round, ovoid, or tubular, come to be enclosed in the tissue of the ovary by delicate vascular processes which shoot forth from the stroma. These cells constitute the primordial ova." These ova gradually mature, and are then discharged from the ovary and pass into the uterus, and on the fertilisation of one of them conception depends. Dr. Kirke writes: "It has long been known that in the so-called oviparous animals, the separation of ova from the ovary may take place independently of impregnation by the male, or even of sexual union. And it is now established that a like maturation and discharge of ova, independently of coition, occurs in mammalia, the periods at which the matured ova are separated from the ovaries and received into the Fallopian tubes being indicated in the lower mammalia by the phenomena of heat or rut; in the human female by the phenomena of menstruation. . . . It may, therefore, be concluded that the two states, heat and menstruation, are analogous, and that the essential accompaniment of both is the maturation and