There is another factor, however, in the physiological repulsiveness of the female genitals themselves, which probably affects the savage quite as strongly as it does ourselves; and which in both cases requires sometimes all the force of sexual passion to overcome. I can, indeed, readily conceive cases in which the impulse is so congenita) ly or pathologically weak as to occasion complete inhibition of desire in the presence of such obstacles.

That this horror femirue is not restricted to the refined and cultured, is shown by the statement of a writer that his gondolier, a Venetian, "stopping one day before the Night and Dawn of S. Lorenzo—sprawling naked women—exclaimed: 'How hideous they are;' I pressed him to explain himself, and he went on: 'the ugliest man naked is handsomer than the finest woman naked. Women have crooked legs, and their sexual organs stink. I only once saw a naked woman. It was in a brothel, when I was eighteen. The sight of her natura made me go out and vomit in the canal. Of very rank cheese he said one day—' puzza come la natura d' una donna.' The man was entirely normal and robust, but seemed to regard sexual congress as a mere evacuation, the sexual instinct apparently not being strong."1 I have myself on more than one occasion heard similar disparaging remarks concerning women from men who, not being professed misocvnists, must have made them entirely on aesthetic grounds.