It has been said in scorn that we are born between urine and excrement; it may be said, in reverence, that the passage through this channel of birth is a sacrament of Nature's more sacred and significant than men could ever invent.
These relationships have been sometimes perceived and their meaning realized by a sort of mystical intuition.

We catch glimpses of such an insight now and again, first among the poets and later among the physicians of the Renaissance.

In 1664 Rolfincius, in his _Ordo et Methods Generationi Partium etc._, at the outset of the second Part devoted to the sexual organs of women, sets forth what ancient writers have said of the Eleusinian and other mysteries and the devotion and purity demanded of those who approached these sacred rites.

It is so also with us, he continues, in the rites of scientific investigation.

"We also operate with sacred things.