and singular applications.  Such are the pills which, dissolved in water and applied to the glans penis, cause it to throb and swell:  so according to Amerigo Vespucci American women could artificially increase the size of their husbands’ parts.[FN#407] The Chinese bracelet of caoutchouc studded with points now takes the place of the Herisson, or Annulus hirsutus,[FN#408] which was bound between the glans and prepuce.  Of the penis succedaneus, that imitation of the Arbor vitae or Soter Kosmou, which the Latins called phallus and fascinum,[FN#409] the French godemiche and the Italians passatempo and diletto (whence our “dildo"), every kind abounds, varying from a stuffed “French letter” to a cone of ribbed horn which looks like an instrument of torture.  For the use of men they have the “merkin,"[FN#410] a heart-shaped article of thin skin stuffed with cotton and slit with an artificial vagina:  two tapes at the top and one below lash it to the back of a chair.  The erotic literature of the Chinese and Japanese is highly developed and their illustrations are often facetious as well as obscene.  All are familiar with that of the strong man who by a blow with his enormous phallus shivers a copper pot; and the ludicrous contrast of the huge-membered wights who land in the Isle of Women and presently escape from it, wrinkled and shrivelled, true Domine Dolittles.  Of Turkistan we know little, but what we know confirms my statement.  Mr. Schuyler in his Turkistan (i. 132) offers an illustration of a “Batchah” (Pers. bachcheh = catamite), “or singing-boy surrounded by his admirers.”  Of the Tartars Master Purchas laconically says (v. 419), “They are addicted to Sodomie or Buggerie.”  The learned casuist Dr. Thomas Sanchez the Spaniard had (says Mirabeau in Kadhesch) to decide a difficult question concerning the sinfulness of a peculiar erotic perversion.  The Jesuits brought home from Manilla a tailed man whose moveable prolongation of the os coccygis measured from 7 to 10 inches:  he had placed himself between two women, enjoying one naturally while the other used his tail as a penis succedaneus.  The verdict was incomplete sodomy and simple fornication.  For the islands north of Japan, the “Sodomitical Sea,” and the “nayle of tynne” thrust through the prepuce to prevent sodomy, see Lib. ii. chap. 4 of Master Thomas Caudish’s Circumnavigation, and vol. vi. of Pinkerton’s Geography translated by Walckenaer.

Passing over to America we find that the Sotadic Zone contains the whole hemisphere from Behring’s Straits to Magellan’s.  This prevalence of “mollities” astonishes the anthropologist, who is apt to consider pederasty the growth of luxury and the especial product of great and civilised cities, unnecessary and therefore unknown to simple savagery, where the births of both sexes are about equal and female infanticide is not practiced.  In many parts of the New World this perversion was accompanied by another depravity of taste—­confirmed cannibalism.[FN#411] The forests and campos abounded in game from the deer to the pheasant-like penelope, and the seas and rivers produced an unfailing supply of excellent fish and shell-fish;[FN#412] yet the Brazilian Tupis preferred the meat of man to every other food.