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his death, he consoled himself by saying that he would go the sooner to find his father, who died some months before."
Here is the narration of a subject who became a masturbator a little later:
"I knew nothing of the vice of onanism until the age of ten years, when one of my companions, at the college where I was placed, instructed me. I could not tell you the number of times that I practiced it to the age of fifteen; then only my eyes were opened to the whole enormity of my fault. I am now eighteen, but though for three years I have not fallen again, I am no less afflicted with frequent pollutions, which occur in spite of myself, during five or six nights in succession. I am never permitted to enjoy tranquil repose; the whole day I am sad. I have four times changed my school, and everywhere I have seen this kind of libertinism carried to excess. Where I terminated my studies, we assembled often in parties of twelve or fifteen to indulge this fine practice. It is doubtless due to my temperament that I have outlived nearly all my comrades; save one, whom I meet quite often, and who leads a very wretched life, all have died in the most frightful torments."
Perhaps the most constant and invariable, as well as earliest signs of the masturbator are the downcast, averted glance, and the disposition to solitude.
Prominent characteristics are, loss of memory and intelligence, morose and unequal disposition, aversion, or indifference to legitimate pleasures and sports, mental abstractions, stupid stolidity, etc. A distinguished German physician, Gottlieb Wogel, gives the following truthful picture:
"The masturbator gradually loses his moral faculties, he acquires a dull, silly, listless, embarrassed, sad, effeminate exterior. He becomes indolent ; averse to and incapable of
