and his partner is astride his thighs, embracing his body with her legs and his neck with her arms, while he embraces her waist; this is stated in the Arabic Perfumed Garden to be the method preferred by most women.

The other most usual variation is the inverse normal position in which the man is supine, and the woman adapts herself to this position, which permits of several modifications obviously advantageous, especially when the man is much larger than his partner.  The Christian as well as the Mahommedan theologians appear, indeed, to have been generally opposed to this superior position of the female, apparently, it would seem, because they regarded the literal subjection of the male which it involves as symbolic of a moral subjection.  The testimony of many people to-day, however, is decidedly in favor of this position, more especially as regards the woman, since it enables her to obtain a better adjustment and greater control of the process, and so frequently to secure sexual satisfaction which she may find difficult or impossible in the normal position.

The theologians seem to have been less unfavorably disposed to the position normal among quadrupeds, a posteriori, though the old Penitentials were inclined to treat it severely, the Penitential of Angers prescribing forty days penance, and Egbert’s three years, if practiced habitually. (It is discussed by J. Petermann, “Venus Aversa,” Sexual-Probleme, Feb., 1909).  There are good reasons why in many cases this position should be desirable, more especially from the point of view of women, who indeed not infrequently prefer it.  It must be always remembered, as has already been pointed out, that in the progress from anthropoid to man it is the female, not the male, whose method of coitus has been revolutionized.  While, however, the obverse human position represents a psychic advance, there has never been a complete physical readjustment of the female organs to the obverse method.  More especially, in Adler’s opinion (op. cit., pp. 117-119), the position of the clitoris is such that, as a rule, it is more easily excited by coitus from behind than from in front.  A more recent writer, Klotz, in his book, Der Mensch ein Vierfuessler (1908), even takes the too extreme position that the quadrupedal method of coitus, being the only method that insures due contact with the clitoris, is the natural human method.  It must, however, be admitted that the posterior mode of coitus is not only a widespread, but a very important variation, in either of its two most important forms:  the Pompeiian method, in which the woman bends forwards and the man approaches behind, or the method described by Boccaccio, in which the man is supine and the woman astride.

Fellatio and cunnilinctus, while they are not strictly methods of coitus, in so far as they do not involve the penetration of the penis into the vagina, are very widespread as