As regards the prevalence of occasional sexual intercourse
between men or women and animals among primitive peoples
at the present time, it is possible to find many scattered refer-
ences by travelers in all parts of the world. Such references by
no means indicate that such practices are, as a rule, common,
but they usually show that they are accepted with a good-humored
indifference.^

Bestiality is very rarely found in towns. In the country
this vice of the clodhopper is far from infrequent. For the
peasant, whose sensibilities are uncultivated and who makes but
the most elementary demands from a woman, the difference
between an animal and a human being in this respect scarcely
seems to be very great. "My wife was away too long," a German
peasant explained to the magistrate, "and so I went with my
sow." It is certainly an explanation that to the uncultivated
peasant, ignorant of theological and juridical conceptions, must
often seem natural and sufficient.
Bestiality thus reaembles masturbation and other abnormal mani-
festations of the sexual impulse which may be practiced merely faute
de mieux and not as, in the strict sense, perversions of the impulse.
Even neerophily may be thus practiced. A young man who when assist-
ing the grave-digger conceived and carried out the idea of digging up
the bodies of young girls to satisfy his passions with, tind whose case



'Various facts and references bearing on this subject are brought
together by Blumenbach, Anthropological Memoirs, translated by Bendy-
she, p. 80; Block, Bitrage zur /Etiologie der FsyohopatMa Seaeualis,
Teil II, pp. 276-283; also Ploss and Bartels, Das Weib, seventh edition,
p. 520.
6



82 PSTCHOLOGi' OF SEX.
