through the sympathetic nervous system. In hysteria, the system is probably in a state of hyperesthesia, or over-sensitiveness.
Strength of Sexual Impulse. While the strength of the sexual impulse in woman is subject to a wide range of variation, there is no doubt in the mind of the serious student of sexual phenomena that its normal manifestation is quite invariably a factor to be reckoned with.
In modern times, quite down to the present, outside of a comparatively limited circle that has had the advantages of rational sex understanding, the notion has prevailed that the sex impulse in woman, at least in "good" or "respectable" women, is a negligible quantity. She was never supposed to evidence any sexual feeling, erotic interest or passion.
In the Middle Ages, the sexual impulse normal to womanhood was perhaps better appreciated than it has been in later times. Luther gave utterance to an opinion not without currency in his day when he wrote: "It is just as impossible for a woman to do without man as for a man to do without woman." He also sums up most excellently the natural aspect of sex in the following words: "He who wishes to restrain the impulse of nature and not allow it free play, as nature will and must, what does he do but this: to insist that nature shall not be nature, that fire shall not burn, that water shall not be wet, that man shall neither eat, drink, nor sleep."
Mantegazza stresses the point that in the female, sexual desire is very rarely accompanied by pains analogous to those which occur in man, in whom sexual excitement manifests itself in painful tension of the testicles and the seminal vesicles, or in spasmodic, long-continued priapism.
Considering woman's function in the realm of sex, her relative conservatism is based on very fundamental grounds. As Professor Erb has pointed out, woman is the principal
