oal--though in the male the penis remains
from first to last normally the almost exclusive seat of specific
excitability. (S. Freud, _Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie_,
p. 62.)

The anus would, however, seem to be sometimes an erogenous zone
even at an early age. Titillation of the anus appears to be
frequently pleasurable in women; and this is not surprising
considering the high degree of erotic sensitivity which is easily
developed at the body orifices where skin meets mucous membrane.
(Thus the meatus of the urethra is a highly erogenous zone, as is
sufficiently shown by the frequency with which hair-pins and
other articles used in masturbation find their way into the
bladder.) It is in this germinal sensitivity, undoubtedly, that
we find a chief key to the practice of _pedicatio_. Freud
attaches great importance to the anus as a sexually erogenous
zone at a very early age, and considers that it very frequently
makes its influence felt in this respect. He believes that
intestinal catarrhs in very early life and haemorrhoids later tend
to develop sensibility in the anus. He finds an indication that
the anus has become a sexually erogenous zone when children wish
to allow the contents of the rectum to accumulate so that
defecation may by its increased difficulty involve voluptuous
sensations, and adds that masturbatory excitation of the anus
with the fingers is by no means rare in older children. (S.
Freud, _Op. cit._, pp. 40-42.) A medical correspondent in India
tells me of a European lady who derived, she said, "quite as
much, indeed more," pleasure from digitally titillating her
rectum as from vulvo-vaginal titillation; she had several times
submitted to _pedicatio_ and enjoyed it, though it was painful
during penetration. The anus may retain this erogenous
irritability even in old age, and Routh mentions the case of a
lady of over 70, the reverse of lustful, who was so excited by
the act of defecation that she was invariably compelled to
masturbate, although this state of things was a source of great
mental misery to her. (C.H.F. Routh, _British Gynaecological
Journal_, February, 1887, p. 48.)

Boelsche has sought the explanation of the erogenous nature of the
anus, and the key to _pedicatio_, in an atavistic return to the
very remote amphibian days when the a