A preliminary
communication appeared in _Nature_, May 14, 1891.
[374] [Later study (1906) has convinced me that my attempt to find a
lunar-monthly period in the female pulse was vitiated by a hopeless error:
for any monthly rhythm in a woman must be sought by arranging her records
according to her own menstrual month; and this menstrual month may vary in
different women, from considerably less than a lunar month to thirty days
or more.]
[375] I may add, however, that in my own case these discharges are--so far
as I can trust my waking consciousness--frequently, if not usually,
dreamless; and that strictly sexual dreams are extremely rare,
notwithstanding the possession of a strongly emotional temperament.
[376] If I can trust my memory, I first experienced this discharge when a
few months under fifteen years of age, and, if so, within a few weeks of
the time when I was, in an instant, suddenly struck with the thought that
possibly the religion in which I had been educated might be false. It is
curiously interesting that the advent of puberty should have been heralded
by this intellectual crisis.
[377] This unfortunate breach in the records was due to the fact that,
failing to discover any regularity in, or law of, the occurrences of the
discharges, I became discouraged and abandoned my records. In June, 1891,
a re-examination of my pulse-records having led to my discovery of a
lunar-monthly rhythm of the pulse, my interest in other physiological
periodicities was reawakened, and I recommenced my records of these
discharges.
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