234 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY
ignominious to know the woman before the age of twenty years. Puberty, on the contrary, was long protracted. The German girls, whose nakedness scandalized the Romans, were not anxious to lose their virginal flower.
Extremely praised were the young men who kept their chastity till late, because they reached a higher stature and became stronger and more vigorous ; and so strong-limbed grew also the Hollanders, equally accustomed from boyhood to inclemency of weather and to go quite naked till puberty, even in the most rigid cold.
In Sparta, under the laws of Lycurgus, the girls, who could not marry till their body had reached its full development, wore only a short sleeveless tunic opened at the sides, that did not cover the knees. This roused the raillery of the Athenians. The boys at twelve years exchanged the toga for the short pallium, slept on straw or upon hay without coverlet, and when fifteen years old slept on reeds.
From these convincing facts we can infer the suitable means of delaying the puberal development in its sexual impulsive mani- festations. The habits of our social life, the manner of clothing and of spending a great part of the daytime in close and warm surroundings in winter, conspire with many other causes to render puberty precocious. It is necessary to avoid such causes of dis- turbance. Gymnastics in the open air ought in youth to be invoked more than the thickness of clothes to keep the body warm. And with gymnastics should be employed the hardening of the body, such as one can obtain from daily cold hydrotherapeutic applications, either general or partial, to the genital parts and the neighboring region. I secured excellent success with cold hip- baths daily repeated in the cases of many incorrigible masturbators of our asylum, when all other means had proved unsuccessful. The hip-bath was repeated four times a day, and lasted from one to five minutes each time. In three cases the success was wonder- ful. After the first week, and in one instance after the third day of hip-baths, the inspection of bed-linen cloths showed that nightly masturbation had ceased, while the overseers informed me that during the daytime the sick young men forbore vicious
