ssible to find many scattered references by travelers in all parts of
the world. Such references by no means indicate that such practices are,
as a rule, common, but they usually show that they are accepted with a
good-humored indifference.[48]

Bestiality is very rarely found in towns. In the country this vice of the
clodhopper is far from infrequent. For the peasant, whose sensibilities
are uncultivated and who makes but the most elementary demands from a
woman, the difference between an animal and a human being in this respect
scarcely seems to be very great. "My wife was away too long," a German
peasant explained to the magistrate, "and so I went with my sow." It is
certainly an explanation that to the uncultivated peasant, ignorant of
theological and juridical conceptions, must often seem natural and
sufficient.

Bestiality thus resembles masturbation and other abnormal
manifestations of the sexual impulse which may be practiced
merely _faute de mieux_ and not as, in the strict sense,
perversions of the impulse. Even necrophily may be thus
practiced. A young man who when assisting the grave-digger
conceived and carried out the idea of digging up the bodies of
young girls to satisfy his passions with, and whose case has
been recorded by Belletrud and Mercier, said: "I could find no
young girl who would agree to yield to my desires; that is why I
have done this. I should have preferred to have relations with
living persons. I found it quite natural to do what I did: I saw
no harm in it, and I did not think that any one else could. As
living women felt nothing but repulsion for me, it was quite
natural I should turn to the dead, who have never repulsed me. I
used to say tender things to them like 'my beautiful, my love, I
love you.'" (Belletrud and Mercier "Perversion de l'Instinct
Genesique," _Annales d'Hygiene Publique_, June, 1903.) But when
so highly abnormal an act is felt as natural we are dealing with
a person who is congenitally defective so far as the finer
developments of intelligence are concerned. It was so in this
case of necrophily; he was the son of a weak-minded woman of
unrestrainable sexual inclinations, and was himself somewhat
feeble-minded; he was also, it is instructive to observe,
anosmic.

But it is by no means only their dulled sensibility or the absence of
women, which accounts for the frequenc