There are not wanting, however, facts in nature to strongly support such a view. Both Goltz and Spallanzani threw considerable confirmatory light upon the subject by their prolonged and interesting course of experiments upon the sexual mechanism of frogs;1 and Tarchanoff, of St. Petersburg, discovered 1 that removal of the lungs, spleen, intestines, stomach, kidneys, parts of the liver, and even the entire heart, did not destroy the sexual power.* Similarly, removal of the testicles was proven to be equally inefficacious; but obliteration of the seminal vesicles very shortly put an end to the sexual function.

But Tarchanoff found, as indeed it is so stated in the better and more modern works on physiology, that the seminal receptacles are " the starting point of the centripetal impulse which, by reflex action, sets in motion the whole complicated mechanism of sexual activity;" and this being established we have at once a secure basis for the explanation of most of the puzzling phenomena which are well known to attend sexual mutilation of the frog, in all its varying degrees; but, as Steinach well points out,* quite a different set of phenomena are observable when such mutilations are practised upon the higher mammals, removal of the seminal vesicles in the white rat being followed by no abatement in the intensity or vigor of the sexual act; and from the fact that the physiological secretions of the seminal vesicles of the rat are quite different from those of the same organs in the frogf that the sexual apparatus of both, and indeed of all the lower orders of mammals, is destitute of many of those neuro-psychic elements which govern its function in man; and from the fact that even the closest observers have failed to elicit from the most laborious research, and experiment, such evidence as would bring them to any common ground of agreement, it is probably as well to pass at once to a consideration of the sexual function in man; leaving these abstruse, and most frequently profitless speculations to such as delight to " revel in the dry dust of learned controversy."