The licentious courts of France often experimented and used whatever lotion, concoction, or substance might prove effective in stimulating waning or exhausted capacities in the members of the court, both male and female. This quest grew to frantic and insidious proportions, for the entire court was tainted with perversions, sexual excesses, and exploratory monstrosities. For this purpose, then, ambergris, which is an ash-colored substance secreted in the intestines of the sperm whale, was used as a coating for chocolates, which were in the nature of titbits designed to arouse the courtiers, lechers, and gallants. As a perfume, ambergris was intended to provoke, through osphresiological channels, sensual attraction. Madame du Barry notoriously used ambergris as a means of ensuring Louis XV’s amatory interest. * * * * * Early chroniclers, herbalists, and compilers of miscellaneous knowledge often refer to tonics, pastilles, and compounds as amatory specifics, but provokingly do not name them. Thus in the Geneanthropoeia, virtually a textbook on anatomy and sexology, produced in 1642 by an Italian professor of medicine named Johannes Benedict Sinibaldus, there is reference to a plant indigenous to the Atlas Mountains in North Africa. This plant was reputedly of great erotic virtue. The difficulty lies in its identification. Allusion is similarly and frequently made to certain trees, shrubs, and herbs of India that have analogous properties. * * * * * The eighteenth century in Europe became an age of debauchery and gluttony. It was the age of licentious drama, of lewd poetry, of unbridled lusts, of the overthrow of all moral and social restraints. This was the situation notably in England, and in France. It is known now, almost axiomatically, that foods, particularly meats and game, stimulate sensual desires. Hence, when there was an excess of sexual diversion, indiscriminate and pervasive through all classes of society as a result of over indulgence in food and equally in drink, there was correspondingly a resultant physiological reaction, a weariness and incapacity and expenditure of energy that clamored for renewal, for stimulants, brews and philtres to remedy this parlous situation. Similarly, in the Orient, from Arabia to Japan, in the South Seas no less than in Africa, the basic sustenance is not animal flesh, but a diet that is largely though not exclusively vegetarian. Such a diet does not encourage erotic tendencies. In consequence, in the East as well as in the West but for quite divergent reasons, there grew up, through the centuries, corpora and manuals of prescriptions, contrivances, suggestions, and a diversity of aids conducive to amatory functions. In essence, the development was along the lines of an entire aphrodisiac laboratory. * * * * *