[106]
If it is, perhaps, somewhat excessive to declare, with Johnstone, that
"woman is the only animal in which rut is omnipresent," we must admit that
the two groups of phenomena merge into or replace each other, that their
object is identical, that they involve similar psychic conditions. Here,
also, we see a striking example of the way in which women preserve a
primitive phenomenon which earlier in the zooelogical series was common to
both sexes, but which man has now lost. Heat and menstruation, with
whatever difference of detail, are practically the same phenomenon. We
cannot understand menstruation unless we bear this in mind.
On the psychic side the chief normal and primitive characteristic of the
menstrual state is the more predominant presence of the sexual impulse.
There are other mental and emotional signs of irritability and instability
which tend to slightly impair complete mental integrity, and to render, in
some unbalanced individuals explosions of anger or depression, in rarer
cases crime, more common;[107] but the heightening of the sexual impulse,
languor, shyness, and caprice are the more human manifestations of an
emotional state which in some of the lower female animals during heat may
produce a state of fury.
The actual period of the menstrual flow, at all events the first two or
three days, does not, among European women, usually appear to show any
heightening of sexual emotion.
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