magical origin, not necessarily founded on actual observation of
the physiological effects of consuming the semen or testes. Thus,
according to W.H. Pearse (_Scalpel_, December, 1897), it is the
custom in Cornwall for country maids to eat the testicles of the
young male lambs when they are castrated in the spring, the
survival, probably, of a very ancient religious cult. (I have not
myself been able to hear of this custom in Cornwall.) In
Burchard's Penitential (Cap. CLIV, Wasserschleben, op. cit., p.
660) seven years' penance is assigned to the woman who swallows
her husband's semen to make him love her more. In the seventeenth
century (as shown in William Salmon's _London Dispensatory_,
1678) semen was still considered to be good against witchcraft
and also valuable as a love-philter, in which latter capacity its
use still survives. (Bourke, _Scatalogic Rites_, pp. 343, 355.)
In an earlier age (Picart, quoted by Crawley, _The Mystic Rose_,
p. 109) the Manichaeans, it is said, sprinkled their eucharistic
bread with human semen, a custom followed by the Albigenses.

The belief, perhaps founded in experience, that semen possesses
medical and stimulant virtues was doubtless fortified by the
ancient opinion that the spinal cord is the source of this fluid.
This was not only held by the highest medical authorities in
Greece, but also in India and Persia.

The semen is thus a natural stimulant, a physiological
aphrodisiac, the type of a class of drugs which have been known
and cultivated in all parts of the world from time immemorial.
(Dufour has discussed the aphrodisiacs used in ancient Rome,
_Histoire de la Prostitution_, vol. II, ch. 21.) It would be vain
to attempt to enumerate all the foods and medicaments to which
has been ascribed an influence in heightening the sexual impulse.
(Thus, in the sixteenth century, aphrodisiacal virtues were
attributed to an immense variety of foods by Liebault in his
_Thresor des Remedes Secrets pour les Maladies des Femmes_, 1585,
pp. 104, et seq.) A large number of them certainly have no such
effect at all, but have obtained this credit either on some
magical ground or from a mistaken association. Thus the potato,
when first introduced from America, had the reputation of being a
powerful aphrodisiac, and the Elizabethan dramatists contain