The 'sexual season' of mammals and the relation of the 'pro-oestrum' to menstruation / by Walter Heape.

  • Walter Heape
Date:
[1900]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The 'sexual season' of mammals and the relation of the 'pro-oestrum' to menstruation / by Walter Heape. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    of the Andaman Islands are said to be born mostly at a particular time of the year—during the rains. I have not done more here than simply to indicate the bearing of a very considerable literature which deals specially or incidentally with this subject; one section of this literature demonstrates by means of statistics, for countries where such are available, an excessive birth rate in special seasons; the other shows that the habits and customs of the less civilised peoples indicate that their sexual and reproductive functions are specially stimulated at definite times of the year. While there is some variation in the season for special sexual activity indicated by the above statements, spring is obviously the most usual time. Hutchinson (1897) seeks to show that the time of marriage among certain widely diver- gent people is lai’gely governed by times of agricultural plenty; for economic reasons this might reasonably be expected, though the evidence he brings forward is not at all conclusive. But it does not seem to me to be an important point. Many reasons, religious or otherwise social, may have arisen to interfere with such a rule, supposing it ever was a rule. The importance of the evidence consists in the proof that any time is or was specially conducive to sexual dis- turbance, and this, I think, has been proved. (See also Laycock [1840] and Ellis's very interesting resume of this question.) The wide valuation in the time of the year during which the sexual season of the lower mammals occurs in different parts of the world, renders it not surprising that there should be wide variation in man also in this respect, in different geographical areas. However that may be, the fact remains that there is much evidence in favour of the view that special sexual seasons were, at one time, universally experienced by the various x’aces of man, a fact of great importance from a comparative point of view. But not only is there evidence of a circumscribed period for reproduction in the ancestral liuinau being, and in those