o manipulations have ever been practiced.[92]

It is difficult to speak very decisively as to the function of the labia
minora. They doubtless exert some amount of protective influence over the
entrance to the vagina, and in this way correspond to the lips of the
mouth after which they are called. They fulfill, however, one very
definite though not obviously important function which is indicated by the
mythologic name they have received. There is, indeed, some obscurity in
the origin of this term, nymphae, which has not, I believe, been
satisfactorily cleared up. It has been stated that the Greek name nymphe
has been transferred from the clitoris to the labia minora. Any such
transfer could only have taken place when the meaning of the word had been
forgotten, and nymphe had become the totally different word _nymphae_, the
goddesses who presided over streams. The old anatomists were much
exercised in their minds as to the meaning of the name, but on the whole
were inclined to believe that it referred to the action of the labia
minora in directing the urinary stream. The term nymphae was first applied
in the modern sense, according to Bergh, in 1599, by Pinaeus, mainly from
the influence of these structures on the urinary stream, and he dilated in
his _De Virginitate_ on the suitability of the term to designate so poetic
a spot.[93] In more modern times Luschka and Sir Charles Bell considered
that it is one of the uses of the nymphae to direct the stream of urine,
and Lamb from his own observation thinks the same conclusion probable. In
reality there cannot be the slightest doubt about the function of the
nymphae, as, in Hyrtl's phrase, "the naiads of the urinary source," and it
can be demonstrated by the simplest experiment.[94]

The nymphae form the intermediate portal of the vagina, as the canal which
conducts to the womb was in anatomy first termed (according to Hyrtl) by
De Graaf.[95] It is a secreting, erectile, more or less sensitive canal
lined by what is usually considered mucous membrane, though some have
regarded it as integument of the same character as that of the external
genitals; it certainly resembles such integument more than, for instance,
the mucous membrane of the rectum. In the woman who has never had sexual
intercourse and has been subjected to no manipulations or accidents
affecting this region, the vagina is closed by a last and final gate of
delicate membrane--scarcely admitting more than a slend