eliest disgust."

This is a curious and interesting generalisation, though it does not
account for what history has transmitted regarding the customs of the
Kelts, Scythians, Bulgars, Tartars, Normans, and for the acknowledged
leniency of modern Slavs to this form of vice.

Burton advances an explanation of its origin. "The only physical cause
for the practice which suggests itself to me, and that must be owned to
be purely conjectural, is that within the Sotadic Zone there is a
blending of the masculine and feminine temperament, a crasis which
elsewhere occurs only sporadically."[47] So far as it goes, this
suggestion rests upon ground admitted to be empirically sound by the
medical writers we have already examined, and vehemently declared to be
indisputable as a fact of physiology by Ulrichs, whom I shall presently
introduce to my readers. But Burton makes no effort to account for the
occurrence of this crasis of masculine and feminine temperaments in the
Sotadic Zone at large, and for its sporadic appearance in other regions.
Would it not be more philosophical to conjecture that the crasis, if
that exists at all, takes place universally; but that the consequences
are only tolerated in certain parts of the globe, which he defines as
the Sotadic Zone? Ancient Greece and Rome permitted them. Modern Greece
and Italy have excluded them to the same extent as Northern European
nations. North and South America, before the Conquest, saw no harm in
them. Since its colonisation by Europeans they have been
discountenanced. The phenomenon cannot therefore be regarded as
specifically geographical and climatic. Besides, there is one fact
mentioned by Burton which ought to make him doubt his geographical
theory. He says that, after the conquest of Algiers, the French troops
were infected to an enormous extent by the habits they had acquired
there, and from them it spread so far and wide into civilian society
that "the vice may be said to have been democratised in cities and large
towns."[48] This surely proves that north of the Sotadic Zone males are
neither 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 ne