[FN#270] This tenet of the universal East is at once fact and unfact.  As a generalism asserting that women’s passion is ten times greater than man’s (Pilgrimage, ii. 282), it is unfact.  The world shows that while women have more philoprogenitiveness, men have more amativeness; otherwise the latter would not propose and would nurse the doll and baby.  Pact, however, in low-lying lands, like Persian Mazanderan versus the Plateau; Indian Malabar compared with Maratha-land; California as opposed to Utah and especially Egypt contrasted with Arabia.  In these hot damp climates the venereal requirements and reproductive powers of the female greatly exceed those of the male; and hence the dissoluteness of morals would be phenomenal, were it not obviated by seclusion, the sabre and the revolver.  In cold-dry or hot-dry mountainous lands the reverse is the case; hence polygamy there prevails whilst the low countries require polyandry in either form, legal or illegal (i,e. prostitution) I have discussed this curious point of “geographical morality” (for all morality is, like conscience, both geographical and chronological), a subject so interesting to the lawgiver, the student of ethics and the anthropologist, in “The City of the Saints " But strange and unpleasant truths progress slowly, especially in England.

[FN#271] This morning evacuation is considered, in the East, a sine qua non of health; and old Anglo-Indians are unanimous in their opinion of the “bard fajar” (as they mispronounce the dawn-clearance).  The natives of India, Hindus (pagans) and Hindis (Moslems), unlike Europeans, accustom themselves to evacuate twice a day, evening as well as morning.  This may, perhaps, partly account for their mildness and effeminacy; for:—­

          C’est la constipation qui rend l’homme rigoureux.

The English, since the first invasion of cholera, in October, 1831, are a different race from their costive grandparents who could not dine without a “dinner-pill.”  Curious to say the clyster is almost unknown to the people of Hindostan although the barbarous West Africans use it daily to “wash ’um belly,” as the Bonney-men say.  And, as Sonnini notes to propose the process in Egypt under the Beys might have cost a Frankish medico his life.

[FN#272] The Egyptian author cannot refrain from this characteristic polissonnerie; and reading it out is always followed by a roar of laughter.  Even serious writers like Al-Hariri do not, as I have noted, despise the indecency.

[FN#273] “’Long beard and little wits,” is a saying throughout the East where the Kausaj (= man with thin, short beard) is looked upon as cunning and tricksy.  There is a venerable Joe Miller about a schoolmaster who, wishing to singe his long beard short, burnt it off and his face to boot:—­which reminded him of the saying.  A thick beard is defined as one which wholly conceals the skin; and in ceremonial ablution it must be combed out with