groid races of South Africa, noticed
by Burton,[49] is due to their excellent customs of sexual initiation
and education at the age of puberty--customs which it is the shame of
modern civilisation to have left unimitated?

However this may be, Burton regards the instinct as natural, not _contre
nature_, and says that its patients "deserve, not prosecution but the
pitiful care of the physician and the study of the psychologist."[50]

Another distinguished anthropologist, Paolo Mantegazza, has devoted
special attention to the physiology and psychology of what he calls "I
pervertimenti dell'amore."[51] Starting with the vulgar error that all
sexual inversion implies the unmentionable act of coition (for which, by
the way, he is severely rebuked by Krafft-Ebing, Psy. Sex., p. 92), he
explains anomalous passions by supposing that the nerves of pleasurable
sensation, which ought to be carried to the genital organs, are in some
cases carried to the rectum.[52] This malformation makes its subject
desire _coitum per anum_. That an intimate connection exists between the
nerves of the reproductive organs and the nerves of the rectum is known
to anatomists and is felt by everybody. Probably some _cinaedi_ are
excited voluptuously in the mode suggested. Seneca, in his Epistles,
records such cases; and it is difficult in any other way to account for
the transports felt by male prostitutes of the Weibling type. Finally,
writers upon female prostitution mention women who are incapable of
deriving pleasure from any sexual act except _aversa venus_.

Mantegazza's observation deserves to be remembered, and ought to be
tested by investigation. But, it is obvious, he pushes the corollary he
draws from it, as to the prevalence of sexual inversion, too far.

He distinguishes three classes of sodomy: (1) Perpheric or anatomical,
caused by an unusual distribution of the nerves passing from the spine
to the reproductive organs and the rectum; (2) psychical, which he
describes as "specific to intelligent men, cultivated, and frequently
neurotic," but which he does not attempt to elucidate, though he calls
it "not a vice, but a passion"; (3) luxurious or lustful, when the
_aversa venus_ is deliberately chosen on account of what Mantegazza
terms "la desolante larghezza" of the female.[53]

Mantegazza winds up, like Burton, by observing that "sodomy, studied
with the pitying and indulgent eye of the physician and the
physiologist, is consequentl