Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/71

 originated by physical disturbances which perpetually distract the mind's attention, become a chronic mental disorder; the feeling of charity dies out; we live for ourselves alone; we have no care for others. And all this change of nature is the consequence of an injudicious diet.

I have already called attention to the statements of Professor Huxley concerning Protoplasm, or the physical basis of life. I now propose to recur to it again. It is incontestably proved that all life originates in a gelatinous substance, — animal and vegetable life alike. It is also generally believed that "a man without love is no man at all;" and the same holds true of woman. (There never yet was a really great man or woman who was not open-hearted, generous, oftentimes faulty, and in all cases weak in the amorous departments of common human nature. There is no class of diseases so prevalent in the world as those which affect the brain, the nerves, and the sexual organizations of both sexes alike; none are so hard to cure, none so terrible in their results, — for insanity in a hundred forms attests this truth. Exhaustion is said to be the cause. But exhaustion of what? Of blood? No; for you may bleed a man to the verge of death, yet leave him sane, healthy but weak. Of semen, in the case of man, or lochia in that of woman? No; either of these are inadequate to the results we see. Of what, then, are such people exhausted, — those females, for instance, who by love disappointments are blighted in a month; or those men who by continued libertinism or solitary habits have reached life's strand? I answer they have lost the power to chemically generate the physical under-layer of life, that element known to modern science as Protoplasm, not the mere nitrogenous lining of cells, but the vivificatory unctious First-Matter that constitutes the primal nucleoli of the billion-fold forms of organic life, and without which no life at all could be. Good food is consigned to the stomach, by it is changed into chyme and chyle; is then passed into the blood, is exposed to the action of ether, oxygen, and electricity through the instrumentality of the lungs, and undergoes a change into phosogen, and as such makes its round through the body generally, until a certain portion of it is lodged by the way, forming nails, hair, and bone. Still rushing on its course, it is acted on by light, ether, and magnetism through the instrumentality of the skin, and undergoes a further transmutation into