The Arab erotologist Umar ibn Muhammed al-Nefzawi, author of _The Perfumed Garden_, a survey in amatory practices, discusses the entire range of erotic experiences and procedures among men and women. He treats of genital conditions, medical problems, potions, sexual ceremonials, circumstances favorable to amatory consummations, manipulations and contrivances and preparations that affect amatory potentialities. With all this mass of detail and particularization of venereal topics, the author emphasizes that his work is not an exposition directed toward lewd and libidinous ends, but a virtual glorification of the gifts bestowed upon men by divine graciousness and indulgent beneficence. * * * * * Plutarch, the Greek historian and philosopher, in his _De Sanitate Tuenda Praecepta_, Advice on Keeping Well, tells of an amatory incident: When the young men described by Menander were, as they were drinking, insidiously beset by the pimp, who introduced some handsome and high-priced concubines, each one of them (as he says), Bent down his head and munched his own dessert, being on his guard and afraid to look at them. * * * * * The inventive genius of man has included in the preparation of love philtres the most heterogeneous items, such as: human fingers, hoopee brains, tobacco, human excrement, snake bones, toads, skulls and intestinal fluids and organs. Horace and Catullus, Pliny the Elder and Apuleius, among the Romans, have frequent occasion to refer to philtres and their ingredients and effects. So too the medieval and later physicians and demonographers have much to say on the subject: Martin Delrio and Sprenger, Reginald Scott and Bodin, Johannes Muller and Sinibaldus. A Roman recipe, composed by a witch, runs as follows: Bring the eggs and plumage foul Of a midnight shrieking owl, Be they well besmear’d with blood Of the blackest venom’d toad, Bring the choicest drugs of Spain, Produce of the poisonous plain, Then into the charm be thrown, Snatch’d from famish’d bitch, a bone, Burn them all with magic flame, Kindled first by Colchian dame. John Gay, the eighteenth century playwright, in _The Shepherd’s Week_, has one of the characters refer to a philtre in a casual and incidental manner, implying that the practice of this usage was in common vogue: And in love powder all my money spent; Behap what will, next Sunday after prayers, When to the ale house Lupperkin repairs, These golden flies into his mug I’ll throw, And soon the swain with fervent love shall glow. Shakespeare, too, in _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, alludes to the love philtre: