to reveal the nature of her intimate experience, even with the adoption of precautions, and although the fact may be present to her that, by helping to reveal the nature of her abnormality, she may be helping to lighten the burden of it on other women.  Among the numerous confessions voluntarily sent to Krafft-Ebing there is not one by a woman.  There is, again, the further reason that well-marked and fully developed cases of inversion are probably rarer in women, though a slighter degree may be more common; in harmony with the greater affectability of the feminine organism to slight stimuli, and its lesser liability to serious variation.[146]

The same aberrations that are found among men are, however, everywhere found among women.  Feminine inversion has sometimes been regarded as a vice of modern refined civilization.  Yet it was familiar to the Anglo-Saxons, and Theodore’s Penitential in the seventh century assigned a penance of three years (considerably less than that assigned to men, or for bestiality) to “a woman fornicating with a woman.”  Among the women of savages in all parts of the world homosexuality is found, though it is less frequently recorded than among men.[147]

In New Zealand it is stated on the authority of Moerenhout (though I have not been able to find the reference) that the women practised Lesbianism.  In South America, where inversion is common among men, we find similar phenomena in women.  Among Brazilian tribes Gandavo[148] wrote:—­

“There are certain women among these Indians who determine to be chaste and know no man.  These leave every womanly occupation and imitate the men.  They wear their hair the same way as the men; they go to war with them or hunting, bearing their bows; they continue always in the company of men, and each has a woman who serves her and with whom she lives.”

This has some analogy with the phenomena seen among North American men.  Dr. Holder, who has carefully studied the bote, tells me that he has met no corresponding phenomena in women.

There is no doubt, however, that homosexuality among women is well known to the American Indians in various regions.  Thus the Salish Indians of British Columbia have a myth of an old woman who had intercourse with a young woman by means of a horn used as a penis.[149] In the mythology of the Assiniboine Indians (of Canada and Montana) and the Fox Indians (of Iowa) there are also legends of feminine homosexuality, supposed to have been derived from the Algonkin Cree Indians, who were closely connected with both.[150]

According to the Assiniboine legend, a man’s wife fell in love with his sister and eloped with her, a boneless child being the result of the union; the husband pursued the couple, and killed his wife as well as the child; no one cared to avenge her death.  The Fox legend, entitled “Two Maidens who Played the Harlot with Each Other,” runs as follows:  “It is said