in civilized European women.  In 361 out of 1000 women of good social class he found elongation or thickening, often with a notable degree of wrinkling and pigmentation, and believes that this is always the result of frequently repeated masturbation practiced with the separation of the nymphae; in 30 per cent. of the cases admission of masturbation was made.[91] While this conclusion is probably correct in the main, it requires some qualification.  To assert that whenever in women who have not been pregnant the marked protrusion of the inner lips beyond the outer lips means that at some period manipulation has been practiced with or without the production of sexual excitement is to make too absolute a statement.  It is highly probable that the nymphae, like the clitoris, are congenitally more prominent in some of the lower human races, as they are also in the apes; among the Fuegians, for instance, according to Hyades and Deniker, the labia minora descend lower than in Europeans, although there is not the slightest reason to suppose that these women practice any manipulations.  Among European women, again, the nymphae sometimes protrude very prominently beyond the labia majora in women who are organically of somewhat infantile type; this occurs in cases in which we may be convinced that no manipulations have ever been practiced.[92]

It is difficult to speak very decisively as to the function of the labia minora.  They doubtless exert some amount of protective influence over the entrance to the vagina, and in this way correspond to the lips of the mouth after which they are called.  They fulfill, however, one very definite though not obviously important function which is indicated by the mythologic name they have received.  There is, indeed, some obscurity in the origin of this term, nymphae, which has not, I believe, been satisfactorily cleared up.  It has been stated that the Greek name nymphe has been transferred from the clitoris to the labia minora.  Any such transfer could only have taken place when the meaning of the word had been forgotten, and nymphe had become the totally different word nymphae, the goddesses who presided over streams.  The old anatomists were much exercised in their minds as to the meaning of the name, but on the whole were inclined to believe that it referred to the action of the labia minora in directing the urinary stream.  The term nymphae was first applied in the modern sense, according to Bergh, in 1599, by Pinaeus, mainly from the influence of these structures on the urinary stream, and he dilated in his De Virginitate on the suitability of the term to designate so poetic a spot.[93] In more modern times Luschka and Sir Charles Bell considered that it is one of the uses of the nymphae to direct the stream of urine, and Lamb from his own observation thinks the same conclusion probable.  In reality there cannot be the slightest doubt about the function of the nymphae, as, in Hyrtl’s phrase, “the naiads of the urinary source,” and it can be demonstrated by the simplest experiment.[94]