Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1899, Heft 2-3, pp. 70 et seq.), and in Samoa, again, young girls have a euphemistic name for the penis, aualuma, which is not that in common use (Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1899, Heft 1, p. 31); exactly the same thing is found in Europe, to-day, and is sometimes more marked among young peasant women than among those of better social class, who often avoid, under all circumstances, the necessity for using any definite name.

Singular as it may seem, the Romans, who in their literature impress us by their vigorous and naked grip of the most private facts of life, showed in familiar intercourse a dread of obscene language—­a dread ultimately founded, it is evident, on religious grounds—­far exceeding that which prevails among ourselves to-day in civilization.  “It is remarkable,” Dufour observes, “that the prostitutes of ancient Rome would have blushed to say an indecent word in public.  The little tender words used between lovers and their mistresses were not less correct and innocent when the mistress was a courtesan and the lover an erotic poet.  He called her his rose, his queen, his goddess, his dove, his light, his star, and she replied by calling him her jewel, her honey, her bird, her ambrosia, the apple of her eye, and never with any licentious interjection, but only ‘I will love!’ (Amabo), a frequent exclamation, summing up a whole life and vocation.  When intimate relations began, they treated each other as ‘brother’ and ‘sister.’  These appellations were common among the humblest and the proudest courtesans alike.” (Dufour, Histoire de la Prostitution, vol. ii, p. 78.) So excessive was the Roman horror of obscenity that even physicians were compelled to use a euphemism for urina, and though the urinal or vas urinarium was openly used at the dining-table (following a custom introduced by the Sybarites, according to Athenaeus, Book XII, cap. 17), the decorous guest could not ask for it by name, but only by a snap of the fingers (Dufour, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 174).

In modern Europe, as seems fairly evident from the early realistic dramatic literature of various countries, no special horror of speaking plainly regarding the sacro-pubic regions and their functions existed among the general population until the seventeenth century.  There is, however, one marked exception.  Such a feeling clearly existed as regards menstruation.  It is not difficult to see why it should have begun at this function.  We have here not only a function confined to one sex and, therefore, easily lending itself to a vocabulary confined to one sex; but, what is even of more importance, the belief which existed among the Romans, as elsewhere throughout the world, concerning the specially dangerous and mysterious properties of menstruation, survived throughout mediaeval times. (See e.g., Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib, Bd.  I, XIV; also Havelock