Page:Symonds - A Problem in Modern Ethics.djvu/93

Rh physically incapable of the acts involved in abnormal passion, nor gifted with an insuperable disgust for them. Law, and the public opinion generated by law and religious teaching, have been deterrent causes in those regions. The problem is therefore not geographical and climatic, but social. Again, may it not be suggested that the absence of "the Vice" among the negroes and negroid races of South Africa, noticed by Burton, is due to their excellent customs of sexual initiation and education at the age of puberty—customs which it is the shame of modern civilisation to have left unimitated?

However this may be, Burton regards the instinct as natural, not contre nature, and says that its patients "deserve, not prosecution but the pitiful care of the physician and the study of the psychologist."

Another distinguished anthropologist, Paolo Mantegazza, has devoted special attention to the physiology and psychology of what he calls "I pervertimenti dell'amore." Starting with the vulgar error that all sexual inversion implies the unmentionable act of coition (for which, by the way, he is severely rebuked by Krafft-Ebing, Psy. Sex., p. 92), he explains anomalous passions by supposing that the nerves of pleasurable sensation, which ought to be carried to the genital organs, are in some cases carried to the rectum. This malformation makes its subject desire coitum per anum. That an intimate connection exists between the nerves of the reproductive organs and the nerves of the rectum is known to anatomists and is felt by everybody. Probably some