"One of the most curious collections of statistics on human sexuality from the 19th century is the record of masturbation, nocturnal emission, and occasional sexual intercourse kept from 1852 to 1858 by Philip C. van Buskirk of the United States Marines (Van Buskirk, 1851-1858). Van Buskirk entered the Marine Corps as a 13-year-old-drummer boy in 1846 and was discharged over a decade later as a noncommissioned officer. Like so many other young men 150years ago, he was tormented by fears of the consequences that would result from masturbation and nocturnal emission. He studied the few medical books that were available aboard ship and learned that masturbation and nocturnal emission had dire results. Among other things, they sapped one’s strength, caused innumerable degenerative conditions, were symptoms of moral decay, could prohibit his ever marrying or siring children, and would, in all probability, bring about senility and premature death. He was determined to save himself, and it was to that end that he began a record of his sexual activity. By keeping track of emissions, he hoped to gauge the effectiveness of his methods for controlling and ultimately eliminating both induced and involuntary orgasms. It was to be one through study, will power, and what can only be described as clean living. He began recording his masturbations and orgasms induced by others in January, 1852. Nocturnal emissions were added to the record in September of the same year. From then until the end of 1858, he kept a careful and apparently an accurate account of all expenditures of semen. The questions raised by Van Buskirk’s tables concern, first, the manner in which his rates of sexual activity correspond to similar but more recently accumulated data and, second, the possibility of relating his combined rates of masturbation and coitus to his patterns of nocturnal emission. Although several early-day sex researchers included material on masturbation and nocturnal emission in their works, the number of cases reported was small, methods of compiling data varied considerably, and much of the information was anecdotal (Ellis, 1927, pp. 112-120, 145, 190, 297-300, 343; Hall, 1905, 1905, pp 453-454; Hirschfeld, 1948, pp. 103-121). In dealing with the relationship between Van Buskirk’s rates of emission and the rated from more recent samples, the only investigation of comparable subject matter involving large numbers of male respondents was that conducted 4 decades ago by Kinsey, Pomeroy, and Martin (1948). Virtually all of the material Van Buskirk recorded can be contrasted directly with similar data in the Kinsey study."