Nature, usually a safe guide, seems for some unaccountable reason, to yet delight in the creation of sexual anomalies. An hysterical woman, frail, fidgety, a bundle of nerves, possesses an inscrutable charm for big, strong men; but woe betide the latter when the honeymoon has waned, and the stern conflicts and troubles of life begin. Instead of a helpmeet, a support, a brave, patient companion in his misfortunes, the man who marries one of these fragile flowers will be too apt to find in her only a garrulous faultfinder, a complainer, whose noblest effort in time of trial will be to throw herself into a fit.

Juvenal's aphorism—mens sana in sano—ought to be remembered in no department of life more religiously than in selecting a wife. As I have intimated, for some strange reason—or more properly for lack of any—large men seem to have a partiality for small women; although here, above all other cases, the law of opposites should not hold. Small favors should not be thankfully received. How often do we see in the streets immense men, tall enough to light their cigars at a lamp-post, with women clinging to them about large enough to make decent charms for their watch-chains; and, on the other hand, samples of feminine "sweetness long drawn out"—delightful specimens of Brobdingnagian loveliness, whom a man couldn't possibly get acquainted with more than two-thirds of in an ordinary lifetime—pegging along with a little hop-o'-my-thumb, an abridged edition of masculinity, like Cassius, of "a lean and hungry look."

This should not be so. If there were not many other self-sufficient reasons, one the mere aesthetics of society, the disparity in physical stature ought to warn us against such sexual incompatibilities on the simple ground of consideration for the female; that is, if she be small and the male large. Not only is sexual connection in such cases exceedingly painful, entailing intense suffering upon the wife, and equally intense disappointment upon the husband, but, should she bear him children, the danger to the life and health of the mother is rendered greater by the naturally greater size of the child begotten of such a father. While this particular objection does not apply if the physical status of the parents be reversed, there are, nevertheless, others equally weighty to forbid the union of a small man with a large woman, among which may be pointed out the lack of pleasure to the former from the disparity of size in the sexual organs. A large woman cannot, naturally, get proper satisfaction from a small man.