lying on the side.  Sometimes, as on the west coast of Africa, the woman is supine and the man more or less erect; or, as among the Queenslanders (as described by Roth) the woman is supine and the man squats on his heels with her thighs clasping his flanks, while he raises her buttocks with his hands.

The position of coitus in which the man is supine is without doubt a natural and frequent variation of the specifically human obverse method of coitus.  It was evidently familiar to the Romans.  Ovid mentions it (Ars Amatoria, III, 777-8), recommending it to little women, and saying that Andromache was too tall to practice it with Hector.  Aristophanes refers to it, and there are Greek epigrams in which women boast of their skill in riding their lovers.  It has sometimes been viewed with a certain disfavor because it seems to confer a superiority on the woman.  “Cursed be he,” according to a Mohammedan saying, “who maketh woman heaven and man earth.”

Of special interest is the wide prevalence of an attitude in coitus recalling that which prevails among quadrupeds.  The frequency with which on the walls of Pompeii coitus is represented with the woman bending forward and her partner approaching her posteriorly has led to the belief that this attitude was formerly very common in Southern Italy.  However that may be, it is certainly normal at the present day among various more or less primitive peoples in whom the vulva is often placed somewhat posteriorly.  It is thus among the Soudanese, as also, in an altogether different part of the world, among the Eskimo Innuit and Koniags.  The New Caledonians, according to Foley, cohabit in the quadrupedal manner, and so also the Papuans of New Guinea (Bongu), according to Vahness.  The same custom is also found in Australia, where, however other postures are also adopted.  In Europe the quadrupedal posture would seem to prevail among some of the South Slavs, notably the Dalmatians. (The different methods of coitus practiced by the South Slavs are described in Kryptadia vol. vi, pp. 220, et seq.)

This method of coitus was recommended by Lucretius (lib. iv) and also advised by Paulus AEginetus as favorable to conception. (The opinions of various early physicians are quoted by Schurig, Spermatologia, 1720, pp. 232, et seq.).  It seems to be a position that is not infrequently agreeable to women, a fact which may be brought into connection with the remarks of Adler already quoted (p. 131) concerning the comparative lack of adjustment of the feminine organs to the obverse position.  It is noteworthy that in the days of witchcraft hysterical women constantly believed that they had had intercourse with the Devil in this manner.  This circumstance, indeed, probably aided in the very marked disfavor in which coitus a posteriori fell after the decay of classic influences.  The mediaeval physicians described it as mos diabolicus and mistakenly supposed