mental commotion.  The same accident frequently happens to him during sleep, accompanied by dreams of whipping.  Nesterus proceeds to mention that this “laudatus vir” was also extremely sensitive to the odor of strawberries and other fruits, which produced nausea.  He was evidently a neurotic subject.  (L.C.F.  Garmanni et Aliorum Virorum Clarissimorum, Epistolarum Centuria, Rostochi et Lipsiae, 1714.)

In England we find that toward the end of the sixteenth century one of Marlowe’s epigrams deals with a certain Francus who before intercourse with his mistress “sends for rods and strips himself stark naked,” and by the middle of the seventeenth century the existence of an association between flagellation and sexual pleasure seems to have been popularly recognized.  In 1661, in a vulgar “tragicomedy” entitled The Presbyterian Lash, we find:  “I warrant he thought that the tickling of the wench’s buttocks with the rod would provoke her to lechery.”  That whipping was well known as a sexual stimulant in England in the eighteenth century is sufficiently indicated by the fact that in one of Hogarth’s series representing the “Harlot’s Progress” a birch rod hangs over the bed.  The prevalence of sexual flagellation in England at the end of that century and the beginning of the nineteenth is discussed by Duehren (Iwan Bloch) in his Geschlechtsleben in England (1901-3), especially vol. ii, ch. vi.

While, however, the evidence regarding sexual flagellation is rare, until recent times whipping as a punishment was extremely common.  It is even possible that its very prevalence, and the consequent familiarity with which it was regarded, were unfavorable to the development of any mysterious emotional state likely to act on the sexual sphere, except in markedly neurotic subjects.  Thus, the corporal chastisement of wives by husbands was common and permitted.  Not only was this so to a proverbial extent in eastern Europe, but also in the extreme west and among a people whose women enjoyed much freedom and honor.  Cymric law allowed a husband to chastise his wife for angry speaking, such as calling him a cur; for giving away property she was not entitled to give away; or for being found in hiding with another man.  For the first two offenses she had the option of paying him three kine.  When she accepted the chastisement she was to receive “three strokes with a rod of the length of her husband’s forearm and the thickness of his long finger, and that wheresoever he might will, excepting on the head”; so that she was to suffer pain only, and not injury. (R.B.  Holt, “Marriage Laws and Customs of the Cymri,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute, August-November, 1898, p. 162.)

“The Cymric law,” writes a correspondent, “seems to have survived in popular belief in the Eastern and Middle States of the United States.  In police-courts in New York, for example, it has been unsuccessfully