fornicatio, from the fornices in Rome, where the lewd women prostituted themselves for money), the act of incontinency between single persons. Upon this subject we find the following observations in Paley's Moral and Political Philosophy:

"The Scriptures give no sanction to those austerities which have been since imposed upon the world under the name of Christ's religion, as the celibacy of the clergy; the praise of perpetual virginity, the prohibitio concubitus cum graviida uxore; but, with a just knowledge of, and regard to, the condition and interest of the human species, have provided in the marriage of one man with one woman an adequate gratification for the propensities of their nature, and have restrained them to that gratification.

"The avowed toleration, and in some countries the licensing, taxing, and regulating of public brothels, has appeared to the people an authorizing of fornication, and has contributed, with other causes, so far to vitiate the public opinion, that there is no practice of which the immorality is so little thought of or acknowledged, although there are few in which it can more plainly be made out. The legislators who have patronized receptacles of prostitution ought to have foreseen this effect, as well as considered, that whatever facilitates fornication, diminishes marriages. And as to the usual apology for this relaxed discipline, the danger of greater enormities if access to prostitutes were too strictly watched and prohibited, it will be time enough to look to that after the laws and the magistrates have done their utmost. The greatest vigilance of both will do more than oppose some bounds and some difficulties to this intercourse. And after all, these pretended fears are without foundation in experience. The men are in all respects the most virtuous in countries where the women are most chaste.

"If fornication be criminal, all those incentives which lead to it are accessories to the crime; as lascivious conversation, whether expressed in obscene or disguised under modest phrases; also wanton songs, pictures, books, the writing, publishing, and circulating of which, whether out of frolic or for some pitiful profit, is productive of so extensive a mischief from so mean a temptation, that few crimes within the reach of private wickedness have more to answer for, or less to plead in their excuse."