It may be noticed that among non-European races it is among women, and especially among those who are subjected to the excitement of a life professionally devoted to some form of pleasure, that the use of the artificial instruments of auto-erotism is chiefly practiced.  The same is markedly true in Europe.  The use of an artificial penis in solitary sexual gratification may be traced down from classic times, and doubtless prevailed in the very earliest human civilization, for such an instrument is said to be represented in old Babylonian sculptures, and it is referred to by Ezekiel (Ch.  XVI. v. 17).  The Lesbian women are said to have used such instruments, made of ivory or gold with silken stuffs and linen.  Aristophanes (Lysistrata, v. 109) speaks of the manufacture by the Milesian women of a leather artificial penis, or olisbos.  In the British Museum is a vase representing a hetaira holding such instruments, which, as found at Pompeii, may be seen in the museum at Naples.  One of the best of Herondas’s mimes, “The Private Conversation,” presents a dialogue between two ladies concerning a certain olisbos (or nbon), which one of them vaunts as a dream of delight.  Through the Middle Ages (when from time to time the clergy reprobated the use of such instruments[191]) they continued to be known, and after the fifteenth century the references to them became more precise.  Thus Fortini, the Siennese novelist of the sixteenth century, refers in his Novelle dei Novizi (7th Day, Novella XXXIX) to “the glass object filled with warm water which nuns use to calm the sting of the flesh and to satisfy themselves as well as they can”; he adds that widows and other women anxious to avoid pregnancy availed themselves of it.  In Elizabethan England, at the same time, it appears to have been of similar character and Marston in his satires tells how Lucea prefers “a glassy instrument” to “her husband’s lukewarm bed.”  In sixteenth century France, also, such instruments were sometimes made of glass, and Brantome refers to the godemiche; in eighteenth century Germany they were called Samthanse, and their use, according to Heinse, as quoted by Duehren, was common among aristocratic women.  In England by that time the dildo appears to have become common.  Archemholtz states that while in Paris they are only sold secretly, in London a certain Mrs. Philips sold them openly on a large scale in her shop in Leicester Square.  John Bee in 1835, stating that the name was originally dil-dol, remarks that their use was formerly commoner than it was in his day.  In France, Madame Gourdan, the most notorious brothel-keeper of the eighteenth century, carried on a wholesale trade in consolateurs, as they were called, and “at her death numberless letters from abbesses and simple nuns were found among her papers, asking for a ‘consolateur’ to be sent."[192] The modern French instrument is described by Gamier as of hardened red rubber, exactly imitating the penis and capable of holding warm milk or other fluid for injection at the moment of orgasm; the compressible scrotum is said to have been first added in the eighteenth century.[193]