large, but the pudendal much smaller, possibly, Bryan Robinson suggests, because women take a less active part in coitus.  The nerve supply of the clitoris, however, is three or four times as large as that of the penis in proportion to size. (F.B.  Robinson, “The Intimate Nervous Connection of the Genito-Urinary Organs With the Cerebro-Spinal and Sympathetic Systems,” New York Medical Journal, March 11, 1893; id., The Abdominal Brain, 1899.)

Of all the sexual organs the penis is without doubt that which has most powerfully impressed the human imagination.  It is the very emblem of generation, and everywhere men have contemplated it with a mixture of reverence and shuddering awe that has sometimes, even among civilized peoples, amounted to horror and disgust.  Its image is worn as an amulet to ward off evil and invoked as a charm to call forth blessing.  The sexual organs were once the most sacred object on which a man could place his hands to swear an inviolate oath, just as now he takes up the Testament.  Even in the traditions of the great classic civilization which we inherit the penis is fascinus, the symbol of all fascination.  In the history of human culture it has had far more than a merely human significance; it has been the symbol of all the generative force of Nature, the embodiment of creative energy in the animal and vegetable worlds alike, an image to be held aloft for worship, the sign of all unconscious ecstasy.  As a symbol, the sacred phallus, it has been woven in and out of all the highest and deepest human conceptions, so intimately that it is possible to see it everywhere, that it is possible to fail to see it anywhere.

In correspondence with the importance of the penis is the large number of names which men have everywhere bestowed upon it.  In French literature many hundred synonyms may be found.  They were also numerous in Latin.  In English the literary terms for the penis seem to be comparatively few, but a large number of non-literary synonyms exist in colloquial and perhaps merely local usage.  The Latin term penis, which has established itself among us as the most correct designation, is generally considered to be associated with pendere and to be connected therefore with the usually pendent position of the organ.  In the middle ages the general literary term throughout Europe was coles (or colis) from caulis, a stalk, and virga, a rod.  The only serious English literary term, yard (exactly equivalent to virga), as used by Chaucer—­almost the last great English writer whose vocabulary was adequate to the central facts of life—­has now fallen out of literary and even colloquial usage.