Please excuse this unsolicited note, but among the two hundred scholars whose intellectual products I have studied, I believe that you alone might give my next statement any serious attention (as it is based upon your own field of expertise), becuase it appears to violate the taboo against mixing Religion with Science and might imply belief in the tenents of "Orgone Theory". Ethnically speaking, masturbation is a true physical and moral disease, which tends to leave a mark of abjectness and decadence with a people or with a race. It debases the man in what should be his poetic and his ardent years, by substituting for the gloriously violent combats of love the easy and secret pleasures of the hand or of an implement yet more vile; as the result of this comes vileness, hypocrisy, brutalisation, and the prostitution of character. A hundred, a thousand times better is the lust which lies in a love that is at least shared, which, even in its extremes, encounters a certain restraint in the complete satisfaction of a natural need shared between two beings. The sexual embrace very rarely slays with its excesses; whereas masturbation is often suicide, and when the organism does not die, the character and dignity do, the light of amorous idealism is extinguished, and every fibre of manly resolution is obliterated. If an inhabitant from another planet were to come down from above, and if he could contemplate with eagle's eye, upon the psychologic chart of our planet, the varying characteristics of the human race, he would certainly jot down in his notebook, among the moral characteristics of Europeans and their overseas colonists, this stigma: *race*of*masturbators*. And it may be, that winged contemplator would become aware of an odor of moral decay, of a moldy, sexual smell on all side, with thousands of young men and girls spilling in the sheets or in dark passage-ways mankind's sovereign life-giving fluid. Until such time as this convulsed and scrofulous civilization of ours shall learn to give to every man born of woman a loaf of bread and a woman, the nauseous stench of solitary vice will continue to contaminate every vein of our body social, transforming love's joyous grape-cluster into a handful of musty corn, devoured by cryptogamia. Solitary lust tends to approach the embrace, when it seeks a lustful ally. Man may masturbate man, and woman may do the same to woman. In the former instance, there is merely an exchange of manual labor; but in the latter, the situation is more complicated and there is room for refinements to enter; owing to the special structure of the female genitals and the wayward character of the feminine imagination, lust is readily turned into a proteiform and special vice. Thus, woman may simply reciprocate, by giving to her companion the pleasure which she herself has received; but more often, she employs her tongue, and then we have *cunnilingus* and *Lesbian* love, so named from the Isle of Lesbos, to which historic tradition assigns the origin of a perversion which, in all truth, must have been born along with womankind. Another form of reciprocal masturbation in women occurs when a woman possessing an exceptionally long clitoris is thereby enabled to simulate the sexual embrace with another woman. It is this form of vice which may more accurately be termed *Tribadism*, the practitioners of which were known to the Latins as *frictrices* or *subigatrices*. Today, however, tribadism is synonymous with physical love between two women, whether such love finds satisfaction in one or another mode. Even among our won women folk, this vice is by no means rare. I have known a number, married and with children, who seek pleasure only of a woman friend or a female lover, whom they passionately adore, and of whom they are very, very jealous. More often than once, Lesbianism brings with it domestic unhappiness; and it behooves the married man to keep a sharp eye out for those strange and hidden manifestations of lasciviousness, which, taken in the beginning, may be dominated and overcome by physiologic love. Where the vice is of long standing, a cure is all but impossible; for the reason that the clitoris, with prolonged exercise of its nerves, becomes unduly sensitive and over-developed, and all normal pleasure is thereafter a pale and colorless thing, compared to the Lesbian's convulsive spasms. The husband then may find himself in a cruel dilemma, having to choose between loathing and contemning the companion of his loves, or himself acquiring a vice, which alone can satisfy and make her happy. A wholesome, honest upbringing may, however, almost always forestall such an aberration, the fruit of that unhealthy hypocrisy with which we are used to surrounding the mysteries of love. Sincerely, Paolo Mantegazza