preliminaries, or as vicarious forms of coitus, alike among civilized and uncivilized peoples.  Thus, in India, I am told that fellatio is almost universal in households, and regarded as a natural duty towards the paterfamilias.  As regards cunnilinctus Max Dessoir has stated (Allgemeine Zeitschrift fuer Psychiatrie, 1894, Heft 5) that the superior Berlin prostitutes say that about a quarter of their clients desire to exercise this, and that in France and Italy the proportion is higher; the number of women who find cunnilinctus agreeable is without doubt much greater.  Intercourse per anum must also be regarded as a vicarious form of coitus.  It appears to be not uncommon, especially among the lower social classes, and while most often due to the wish to avoid conception, it is also sometimes practiced as a sexual aberration, at the wish either of the man or the woman, the anus being to some extent an erogenous zone.

The ethnic variations in method of coitus were briefly discussed in volume v of these Studies, “The Mechanism of Detumescence,” Section II.  In all civilized countries, from the earliest times, writers on the erotic art have formally and systematically set forth the different positions for coitus.  The earliest writing of this kind now extant seems to be an Egyptian papyrus preserved at Turin of the date B.C. 1300; in this, fourteen different positions are represented.  The Indians, according to Iwan Bloch, recognize altogether forty-eight different positions; the Ananga Ranga describes thirty-two main forms.  The Mohammedan Perfumed Garden describes forty forms, as well as six different kinds of movement during coitus.  The Eastern books of this kind are, on the whole, superior to those that have been produced by the Western world, not only by their greater thoroughness, but by the higher spirit by which they have often been inspired.

The ancient Greek erotic writings, now all lost, in which the modes of coitus were described, were nearly all attributed to women.  According to a legend recorded by Suidas, the earliest writer of this kind was Astyanassa, the maid of Helen of Troy.  Elephantis, the poetess, is supposed to have enumerated nine different postures.  Numerous women of later date wrote on these subjects, and one book is attributed to Polycrates, the sophist.

Aretino—­who wrote after the influence of Christianity had degraded erotic matters perilously near to that region of pornography from which they are only to-day beginning to be rescued—­in his Sonnetti Lussuriosi described twenty-six different methods of coitus, each one accompanied by an illustrative design by Giulio Romano, the chief among Raphael’s pupils.  Veniero, in his Puttana Errante, described thirty-two positions.  More recently Forberg, the chief modern authority, has enumerated ninety positions, but, it is said, only forty-eight can, even on