Subsequent enquiries in many and distant countries enabled me to arrive at the following conclusions:—­

1.  There exists what I shall call a “Sotadic Zone,” bounded westwards by the northern shores of the Mediterranean (N.  Lat. 43 ) and by the southern (N.  Lat. 30 ).  Thus the depth would be 780 to 800 miles including meridional France, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Greece, with the coast-regions of Africa from Marocco to Egypt.

2.  Running eastward the Sotadic Zone narrows, embracing Asia Minor, Mesopotamia and Chaldaea, Afghanistan, Sind, the Punjab and Kashmir.

3.  In Indo-China the belt begins to broaden, enfolding China, Japan and Turkistan.

4.  It then embraces the South Sea Islands and the New World where, at the time of its discovery, Sotadic love was, with some exceptions, an established racial institution.

5.  Within the Sotadic Zone the Vice is popular and endemic, held at the worst to be a mere peccadillo, whilst the races to the North and South of the limits here defined practice it only sporadically amid the opprobrium of their fellows who, as a rule, are physically incapable of performing the operation and look upon it with the liveliest disgust.

Before entering into topographical details concerning pederasty, which I hold to be geographical and climatic, not racial, I must offer a few considerations of its cause and origin.  We must not forget that the love of boys has its noble, sentimental side.  The Platonists and pupils of the Academy, followed by the Sufis or Moslem Gnostics, held such affection, pure as ardent, to be the beau ideal which united in man’s soul the creature with the Creator.  Professing to regard youths as the most cleanly and beautiful objects in this phenomenal world, they declared that by loving and extolling the chef-d’oeuvre, corporeal and intellectual, of the Demiurgus, disinterestedly and without any admixture of carnal sensuality, they are paying the most fervent adoration to the Causa causans.  They add that such affection, passing as it does the love of women, is far less selfish than fondness for and admiration of the other sex which, however innocent, always suggest sexuality;[FN#363] and Easterns add that the devotion of the moth to the taper is purer and more fervent than the Bulbul’s love for the Rose.  Amongst the Greeks of the best ages the system of boy-favourites was advocated on considerations of morals and politics.  The lover undertook the education of the beloved through precept and example, while the two were conjoined by a tie stricter than the fraternal.  Hieronymus the Peripatetic strongly advocated it because the vigorous disposition of youths and the confidence engendered by their association often led to the overthrow of tyrannies.  Socrates declared that “a most valiant army might be composed of boys and their lovers; for that of all men they would be most ashamed to desert one another.”  And even Virgil, despite the foul flavour of Formosum pastor Corydon, could write:—­