We find in the peculiar notion of the Scythians, that the men were all women, as recorded by Herodotus in "Clio," and mentioned elsewhere in this work, a case of wholesale sexual inversion due to psychical influence alone. Notwithstanding the explanation of Hippocrates, who being a physician naturally felt disinclined to admit other than natural causes for the phenomenon, that disease of the jugular veins, from continual riding, had produced it,1 there can be little doubt that it was, ab initio, a simple case of psychical inversion, in which their supposed impotence was looked upon as a divine punishment.

1 The Scythians spent their lives in the saddle. The warrior drank the blood of the first man he stew in battle, imbibing therewith, as he supposed, his adversary's prowess; if he obtained a suit of the king, it entitled him to drink wine from his enemy's skull; and the peculiar sex-belief of the people, it is not unreasonable to suppose, was strengthened and fostered by the idea that they were autochthonous, descended from a union of the god Targitaus with the river Dneiper, and therefore lifted above the ordinary conditions and necessities of sex. For a further account of this remarkable people, the sex-legend of whom, as related by Hippocrates {De Acre, etc.), is undoubtedly apocryphal, see Herodotus, iv, 1-82, 97-142; DiodoniB, tt, 43, et »eq,; and Pliuy, H, N„ IV, 44. the latter of whom alludes to the Scythiuns as Aroteres.