Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 6.djvu/247

 PUBERAL HYGIENE 233

In hot climates puberty is precocious, and the rise of erotic impulse is early and strong. The menstruation of maids in Asia Minor, Arabia, Egypt, and Abyssinia begins at eight or ten years, and so in India, where the religious laws allow the maids to marry at eight years of age. In South America Indian girls at eight or ten years are married (D'Azara). Artificial heat acts in the same manner as natural heat. In Russia, where the peasants sleep with their families near the stoves, exposed to very high temperatures, and where everyone, from the sovereign to the humblest peasant, takes almost once or twice a week his Jiot steam-bath, men and women are united in marriage at the same early age as those who are born under the sky of Hindoostan. The same happens with the Samoyedes, the Ostics, the Tacontas, the Kamtschadales, and the Eskimos, who are even still more pre- cocious. Even in individuals great sexual activity is generally accompanied with great internal heat. Among the most incorri- gible masturbators that I had in the asylum, one could not sup- port during the whole winter any woolen bedclothes, but only a thin cotton coverlet ; the other passed quite bare-breasted through the winter without catching the least cold.

Another consequence of great heat is that the more preco- cious is puberty, so the more precocious is exhaustion. Young oriental men who at the thirteenth year have sexual intercourse at the thirtieth are already worn out, and must have recourse to aphrodisiacal remedies in order to accomplish conjugal duties, while their wives cease at this epoch to menstruate and to bear children, and quite lose their beauty. Cold, on the contrary, is the great check and preserver of sexual activeness. In cold climates and upon the mountains puberty arrives very late, and the customs are generally more austere. The more the body is exposed to cold, the greater is the delay in the development of sexual tendencies. Among the ancient Germans, even at the time of the Romans, though clothes had been imported from the latter, the underaged boys were naked even in winter, while men wore the doublet and bedecked themselves with the second bark of the trees ; and we know by the relations of Csesar and of Tacitus that the venery of young men was late, so that it was