the judicial investigation of impotency.

Legions of doctors have marshaled their legions of books on the
subject of marriage in its relation to medicine and surgery.

In the nineteenth century the _Physiology of Marriage_ is either an
insignificant compilation or the work of a fool written for other
fools; old priests have taken their balances of gold and have weighed
the most trifling scruples of the marriage consciences; old lawyers
have put on their spectacles and have distinguished between every kind
of married transgression; old doctors have seized the scalpel and
drawn it over all the wounds of the subject; old judges have mounted
to the bench and have decided all the cases of marriage dissolution;
whole generations have passed unuttered cries of joy or of grief on
the subject, each age has cast its vote into the urn; the Holy Spirit,
poets and writers have recounted everything from the days of Eve to
the Trojan war, from Helen to Madame de Maintenon, from the mistress
of Louis XIV to the woman of their own day.

Physiology, what must I consider your meaning?

Shall I say that you intend to publish pictures more or less
skillfully drawn, for the purpose of convincing us that a man marries:

From ambition--that is well known;

From kindness, in order to deliver a girl from the tyranny of her
mother;

From rage, in order to disinherit his relations;