practiced pederasty, the passive agent being called by the Indians an hermaphrodite, or double sexed.[38] The relations that from eunuchism led to pederasty are very easy of explanation. Eunuchism induces an effeminate form, softer body, and prevents the growth of the beard; the voice is softer and more melodious; and their timidity renders them also more effeminate, obedient, and dependent. The peculiar commingling of the female form with that of the male furnished to the sculptors the models for those wonderfully well-made forms which are yet to be seen, representing in statuary the forms of Androgynes and Hermaphrodites; that of the favorite eunuch of the emperor Adrian being remarkable for the symmetry of its form and grace of pose. Europe must have been astonished at the tales that were carried back by the early explorers and voyagers, in relation to the New World. The story of the immensity of the quantity of gold and silver, of great stores of hidden treasures, of the quantities of precious gems and priceless crystals was fully discounted when, from the Florida coast and the explorers of the Lower Mississippi, men returned with the tale that in the everglades and in the trackless forests, intersected by navigable sloughs, there dwelt a people half of whom were hermaphrodites. Neither the explorers nor their European historiographers seem able to have grasped the true state of affairs. Many believed in the actual existence of such numbers of these monstrosities, while others, arguing from what was then known regarding the extraordinary development of the nymphae and clitoris, as well as of the great labia, of the women in the African regions, concluded that these supposed _androgynes_, or hermaphrodites, must be women, the dress assumed by these and the menial labors to which they were consigned assisting to favor this opinion. The early Franciscan missionaries to California found the men who were used for pederasty dressed as women.[39] Hammond mentions the practice as in vogue among the Indians of the southwest, which in a measure greatly resembled that of the ancient Scythians in its operation, the men being dressed as women, associating with women, and used for pederastic purposes during the orgies of their festivals. These men had previously been eunuchised by a process of continued and persistent onanism, which caused at the end a complete atrophization of the testicle.