[FN#360] This detail especially excited the veteran’s curiosity.  The reason proved to be that the scrotum of the unmutilated boy could be used as a kind of bridle for directing the movements of the animal.  I find nothing of the kind mentioned in the Sotadical literature of Greece and Rome; although the same cause might be expected everywhere to the same effect.  But in Mirabeau (Kadhesch) a grand seigneur moderne, when his valet-de-chambre de confiance proposes to provide him with women instead of boys, exclaims, “Des femmes! eh! c’est comme si tu me servais un gigot sans manche.”  See also infra for “Le poids du tisserand.”

[FN#361] See Falconry in the Valley of the Indus, London, John Van Voorst, 1852.

[FN#362] Submitted to Government on Dec. 3’, ’47, and March 2, ’48, they were printed in “Selections from the Records of the Government of India.”  Bombay.  New Series.  No. xvii.  Part 2, 1855.  These are (1) Notes on the Population of Sind, etc., and (2) Brief Notes on the Modes of Intoxication, etc., written in collaboration with my late friend Assistant-Surgeon John E. Stocks, whose early death was a sore loss to scientific botany.

[FN#363] Glycon the Courtesan in Athen. xiii. 84 declares that “boys are handsome only when they resemble women,” and so the Learned Lady in The Nights (vol. v. 160) declares “Boys are likened to girls because folks say, Yonder boy is like a girl.”  For the superior physical beauty of the human male compared with the female, see The Nights, vol. iv. 15; and the boy’s voice before it breaks excels that of any diva.

[FN#364] “Mascula,” from the priapiscus, the over-development of clitoris (the veretrum muliebre, in Arabic Abu Tartur, habens cristam), which enabled her to play the man.  Sappho (nat.  B.C. 612) has been retoillee like Mary Stuart, La Brinvilliers, Marie Antoinette and a host of feminine names which have a savour not of sanctity.  Maximus of Tyre (Dissert. xxiv.) declares that the Eros of Sappho was Socratic and that Gyrinna and Atthis were as Alcibiades and Chermides to Socrates:  Ovid who could consult documents now lost, takes the same view in the Letter of Sappho to Phaon and in Tristia ii. 265.

     Lesbia quid docuit Sappho nisi amare puellas?

Suidas supports Ovid.  Longinus eulogises the (a term applied only to carnal love) of the far-famed Ode to Atthis:—­

     Ille mi par esse Deo videtur * * *
     (Heureux! qui pres de toi pour toi seule soupire * * *
     Blest as th’ immortal gods is he, etc.)

By its love symptoms, suggesting that possession is the sole cure for passion, Erasistratus discovered the love of Antiochus for Stratonice.  Mure (Hist. of Greek Literature, 1850) speaks of the Ode to Aphrodite (Frag. 1) as “one in which the whole volume of Greek literature offers the most powerful concentration into one brilliant focus of the modes in which amatory concupiscence can display itself.”  But Bernhardy, Bode, Richter, K. O. Mueller and esp.  Welcker have made Sappho a model of purity, much like some of our dull wits who have converted Shakespeare, that most debauched genius, into a good British bourgeois.