elves in a hammock or rocking-chair,
the delicate vibration of the balls slowly producing the highest degree of
sexual excitement. Joest mentions that this apparatus, though well known
by name to ordinary girls, is chiefly used by the more fashionable
_geishas_, as well as by prostitutes. Its use has now spread to China,
Annam, and India. Japanese women also, it is said, frequently use an
artificial penis of paper or clay, called e.g.. Among the Atjeh, again,
according to Jacobs (as quoted by Ploss), the young of both sexes
masturbate and the elder girls use an artificial penis of wax. In China,
also, the artificial penis--made of rosin, supple and (like the classical
instrument described by Herondas) rose-colored--is publicly sold and
widely used by women.[190]

It may be noticed that among non-European races it is among women, and
especially among those who are subjected to the excitement of a life
professionally devoted to some form of pleasure, that the use of the
artificial instruments of auto-erotism is chiefly practiced. The same is
markedly true in Europe. The use of an artificial penis in solitary sexual
gratification may be traced down from classic times, and doubtless
prevailed in the very earliest human civilization, for such an instrument
is said to be represented in old Babylonian sculptures, and it is referred
to by Ezekiel (Ch. XVI. v. 17). The Lesbian women are said to have used
such instruments, made of ivory or gold with silken stuffs and linen.
Aristophanes (_Lysistrata_, v. 109) speaks of the manufacture by the
Milesian women of a leather artificial penis, or olisbos. In the British
Museum is a vase representing a _hetaira_ holding such instruments, which,
as found at Pompeii, may be seen in the museum at Naples. One of the best
of Herondas's mimes, "The Private Conversation," presents a dialogue
between two ladies concerning a certain olisbos (or nbon), which one of
them vaunts as a dream of delight. Through the Middle Ages (when from time
to time the clergy reprobated the use of such instruments[191]) they
continued to be known, and after the fifteenth century the references to
them became more precise. Thus Fortini, the Siennese novelist of the
sixteenth century, refers in his _Novelle dei Novizi_ (7th Day, Novella
XXXIX) to "the glass object filled with warm water which nuns use to calm
the sting of the flesh and to satisfy themselves as well as they can"; he
adds that widows and other women anxi