We should not be content till the thews and sinews, the powerful bodies and manly minds of our ancestors, are again become prevalent among us, and are blended with the advantages of our increased civilisation, with our greater enlightenment and refinement, and a longer average of life. We should cultivate all those sports and manly exercises, which promote bodily health and vigour, just as sedulously as we cultivate the moral virtues, and should have an equal honour for physical, as for mental excellence, wherever we see it. We should learn to take an equal pleasure and to have an equal reverence for the sensual as the intellectual enjoyments, for the physical as the mental sciences, and in every thing to attain to an impartial and well-balanced sense of the equal grandeur of the material and the moral universe, of a true Physical and Spiritual ligion. END OF PART 1. :. PART II. SEXUAL RELIGIO N. REPRODUCTION AND DEVELOPEMENT. THE subject of the following essays-namely, the nature and laws of the sexual organs, with their diseases, and the ailied evils of poverty and hard work, is, it appears to me, by far the most important of all subjects for our consideration in the present day. There is nothing unfortunately, which has been so much neglected, and on which such wide-spread ignorance prevails; and yet I feel convinced, that there is no subject so deeply affecting the interests of man. From the mystery and secrecy in which sexual matters have been involved, and from the consequent want of due attention to them, the whole of our moral and social philosophy has been rendered unsound at the core, and the progress of our race has been blighted. Before entering upon the diseases of the sexual organs, which arise as all diseases do, from our disobedience to the natural laws, and upon the associated evils of poverty, I shall give a short sketch of these organs and of the function of reproduction. I entreat the reader's attention to this, not only from the surpassing interest of the subject, but because some knowledge of the nature of the sexual organs is necessary to follow the subsequent descriptions of their diseases. There is no part of physiology which is less understood by the generality of mankind, and yet there is not one of deeper interest, and which more urgently demands the attention of us all. Reproduction has been, and still is, viewed as a mysterious and incomprehensible subject, with which none but scientific men should have to do; and feelings of sexual bashfulness and disgust have restrained the generality of mankind from acquiring a knowledge of these organs and their laws. But such feelings are unworthy alike of the dignity of man, and the infinite perfection of nature. Nature demands our calm and reverential study of all her works and laws alike; she has given us no organs which she intended to be shrouded in mystery and concealment; but on the contrary she lays her mighty commands upon us to seek to become acquainted with every one of her all-perfect productions. It is not for us to pick and choose among her works, which we please to attend to, and which we please to avoid; but to pay a like reverential study to all. If the sexual organs be omitted, the knowledge of all the rest of the human frame will avail us little; and we should seek to acquire just as true and as thorough an insight into their laws, as into the processes of respiration or digestion. I have already dwelt upon the sacred duty that rests upon all of us, both men and women, to study a subject which concerns us so nearly as the human frame; and of all the bodily organs there is none which should have more special attention than the reproductive ones, which have been so much neglected by our ancestors. No others are so deeply implicated in the most urgent problems of the present age. All of us should therefore strive to divest ourselves of the childish and degrading feelings of morbid delicacy, which foster the ignorance on these subjects, and have been the causes of greater miseries to our race than almost any others, as I shall endeavour hereafter to show. Dr. Carpenter in his most admirable work on General and Comparative Physiology, says of the function of reproduction, "a very unnecessary degree of mystery has been spread around the exercise of this function, not only by general enquirers, but by scientific physiologists. It has been regarded as a process never to be comprehended by man, of which the nature and the laws are alike inscrutable. A fair comparison, however, with other functions, will show that it is not in reality less comprehensible or more recondite than any one of them; that our acquaintance with each depends upon the facility with which it may be submitted to investigation; and that if properly inquired into by an extensive survey of the animated world, the real character of the process, its conditions, and its mode of operation, may be understood as completely as those of any other vital phenomenon.' All living beings, both plants and animals, have a limited existence, and the race is kept up by a constant succession of new individuals. It is a law which we never see departed from at present, that every living organism has sprung from a pre-existing organism. The doctrine of spontaneous generation, which held that in some cases living beings might originate out of lifeless matter, and which was formerly very prevalent, has gradually lost almost all its supporters, and “has not now any claim," says Dr. Carpenter, "to be received even as a possible hypothesis." Another law which seems at present to be universal, is that every ving thing springs from a parent like itself, so that the different |