H. Northcote, Christianity and Sex Problems, p. 231.
[180] Rosse observed two elephants procuring erection by entwining their proboscides, the act being completed by one elephant opening his mouth and allowing the other to tickle the roof of it. (I. Rosse, Virginia Medical Monthly, October, 1892.)
[181] Féré, "Perversions sexuelles chez les animaux," Revue Philosophique, May, 1897.
[182] Tillier, L'Instinct Sexuel, 1889, p. 270.
[183] Moll, Libido Sexualis, Bd. I, p. 76. The same author mentions (ibid., p. 373) that parrots living in solitary confinement masturbate by rubbing the posterior part of the body against some object until ejaculation occurs. Edmund Selous ("Habits of the Peewit," Zoölogist, April, 1902) suggests that the peewit, when rolling on the ground, and exerting pressure on the anal region, is moved by a sexual impulse to satisfy desire; he adds that actual orgasm appears eventually to take place, a spasm of energy passing through the bird.
[184] Dr. J. W. Howe (Excessive Venery, Masturbation, and Continence, London and New York, 1883, p. 62) writes of masturbation: "In savage lands it is of rare occurrence. Savages live in a state of Nature. No moral obligations exist which compel them to abstain from a natural gratification of their passions. There is no social law which prevents them from following the dictates of their lower nature. Hence, they have no reason for adopting onanism as an outlet for passions. The moral trammels of civilized society, and ignorance of physiological laws, give origin to the vice." Every one of these six sentences is incorrect or misleading. They are worth quoting as a statement of the popular view of savage life.
[185] I can recall little evidence of its existence among the Australian aborigines, though there is, in the Wiradyuri language, spoken over a large part of New South Wales, a word (whether ancient or not, I do not know) meaning masturbation (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, July-Dec., 1904, p. 303). Dr. W. Roth (Ethnological Studies Among the Northwest-Central Queensland Aborigines, p. 184), who has carefully studied the blacks of his district, remarks that he has no evidence as to the practice of either masturbation or sodomy among them. More recently (1906) Roth has stated that married men in North Queensland and elsewhere masturbate during their wives' absence. As regards the Maori of New Zealand, Northcote adds, there is a rare word for masturbation (as also at Rarotonga), but according to a distinguished Maori scholar there are no allusions to the practice in Maori literature, and it was probably not practiced in primitive times. The Maori and the Polynesians of the Cook Islands, Northcote remarks, consider the act unmanly, applying to it a phrase meaning "to make women of themselves." (Northcote, loc. cit., p. 232.)
[186] Greenlees, Journal of Mental Science, July, 1895. A gentleman long resident among the Kaffirs of South Natal, told Northcote, however, that he had met with no word for masturbation, and did not believe the practice prevailed there.
[187] Hyades and Deniker, Mission Scientifique du Cap Horn, vol. vii, p. 295.
[188] La Criminalité en Cochin-Chine, 1887, p. 116; also Mondière, "Monographie de la Femme Annamite," Mémoires Société d'Anthropologie, tome ii, p. 465.
[189] Christian, article on "Onanisme," Dictionnaire Encyclopédique des Sciences Médicales; Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib; Moraglia, "Die Onanie beim normalen Weibe," Zeitschrift für Criminal-Anthropologie, 1897; Dartigues, De la Procréation Volontaire des Sexes, p. 32. In the eighteenth century, the rin-no-tama was known in France, sometimes as "pommes d'amour." Thus Bachaumont, in his Journal (under date July 31, 1773), refers to "a very extraordinary instrument of amorous mystery," brought by a traveler from India; he describes this "boule erotique" as the size of a pigeon's egg, covered with soft skin, and gilded. Cf. F. S. Krauss, Geschlechtsleben in Brauch und Sitte der Japaner, Leipzig, 1907.
[190] It may be worth mentioning that the Salish Indians of British Columbia have a myth of an old woman having intercourse with young women, by means of a horn worn as a penis (Journal of the Anthropological Institute, July-Dec., 1904, p. 342).
[191] In Burchard's Penitential (cap. 142–3), penalties are assigned to the woman who makes a phallus for use on herself or other women. (Wasserschleben, Bussordnungen der abendländlichen Kirche, p. 658.) The penis succedaneus, the Latin phallus or fascinum, is in France called godemiche; in Italy, passatempo, and also diletto, whence dildo, by which it is most commonly known in England. For men, the corresponding cunnus succedaneus is, in England, called merkin, which meant originally (as defined in old editions of Bailey's Dictionary) "counterfeit hair for women's privy parts."
[192] Dühren, Der Marquis de Sade und Seine Zeit, 3d ed., pp. 130, 232; id. Geschlechtsleben in England, Bd. II, pp. 284 et seq.
[193] Gamier, Onanisme, p. 378.
[194] Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1899, p. 669.
[195] The mythology of Hawaii, one may note, tells of goddesses who were impregnated by bananas they had placed beneath their garments. B. Stern mentions (Medizin in der Türkei, Bd. II, p. 24) that the women of Turkey and Egypt use the banana, as well as the cucumber, etc., for masturbation. In a poem in the Arabian Nights, also ("History of the Young Nour with the Frank"), we read: "O bananas, of soft and smooth skins, which dilate the eyes of young girls … you, alone among fruits are endowed with a pitying heart, O consolers of widows and divorced women." In France and England they are not uncommonly used for the same purpose.
[196] See, e.g., Winckel, Die Krankheiten der weiblichen Harnrohre und Blase, 1885, p. 211; and "Lehrbuch der Frauenkrankheiten," 1886, p. 210; also, Hyrtl, Handbuch du Topographischen Anatomie, 7th ed., Bd. II, pp. 212–214. Grünfeld (Wiener medizinische Blätter, November 26, 1896), collected 115 cases of foreign body in the bladder—68 in men, 47 in women; but while those found in men were usually the result of a surgical accident, those found in women were mostly introduced by the patients themselves. The patient usually professes profound ignorance as to how the object came there; or she explains that she accidentally sat down upon it, or that she used it to produce freer urination. The earliest surgical case of this kind I happen to have met with, was recorded by Plazzon, in Italy, in 1621 (De Partibus Generationi Inservientibus, lib. ii, Ch. XIII); it was that of a certain honorable maiden with a large clitoris, who, seeking to lull sexual excitement with the aid of a bone needle, inserted it in the bladder, whence it was removed by Aquapendente.