actions, specially prepared for the purpose of exciting or of gratifying sexual appetites, and the frequency with which even normal photographs of the nude appeal to the same lust of the eyes.

Pygmalionism, or falling in love with statues, is a rare form of erotomania founded on the sense of vision and closely related to the allurement of beauty. (I here use “pygmalionism” as a general term for the sexual love of statues; it is sometimes restricted to cases in which a man requires of a prostitute that she shall assume the part of a statue which gradually comes to life, and finds sexual gratification in this performance alone; Eulenburg quotes examples, Sexuale Neuropathie, p. 107.) An emotional interest in statues is by no means uncommon among young men during adolescence.  Heine, in Florentine Nights, records the experiences of a boy who conceived a sentimental love for a statue, and, as this book appears to be largely autobiographical, the incident may have been founded on fact.  Youths have sometimes masturbated before statues, and even before the image of the Virgin; such cases are known to priests and mentioned in manuals for confessors.  Pygmalionism appears to have been not uncommon among the ancient Greeks, and this has been ascribed to their aesthetic sense; but the manifestation is due rather to the absence than to the presence of aesthetic feeling, and we may observe among ourselves that it is the ignorant and uncultured who feel the indecency of statues and thus betray their sense of the sexual appeal of such objects.  We have to remember that in Greece statues played a very prominent part in life, and also that they were tinted, and thus more lifelike than with us.  Lucian, Athenaeus, AElian, and others refer to cases of men who fell in love with statues.  Tarnowsky (Sexual Instinct, English edition, p. 85) mentions the case of a young man who was arrested in St. Petersburg for paying moonlight visits to the statue of a nymph on the terrace of a country house, and Krafft-Ebing quotes from a French newspaper the case which occurred in Paris during the spring of 1877 of a gardener who fell in love with a Venus in one of the parks. (I.  Bloch, Beitraege zur AEtiologie der Psychopathia Sexualis, Teil II, pp. 297-305, brings together various facts bearing on this group of manifestations.)

Necrophily, or a sexual attraction for corpses, is sometimes regarded as related to pygmalionism.  It is, however, a more profoundly morbid manifestation, and may perhaps he regarded as a kind of perverted sadism.

Founded on the sense of vision also we find a phenomenon, bordering on the abnormal, which is by Moll termed mixoscopy.  This means the sexual pleasure derived from the spectacle of other persons engaged in natural or perverse sexual actions.  (Moll, Kontraere Sexualempfindung, third edition, p. 308.  Moll considers that in some cases mixoscopy is related to masochism.