Eros is triumphant in the twentieth century, in every social frame, in every milieu, and in every country. Henri Bergson, the French philosopher who is associated with the concept of _l’élan vital_—the vital urge, or, as George Bernard Shaw termed it, the life force, declared that this twentieth century has become aphrodisiac. * * * * * The love-potion is not a matter of academic history only: it is still flourishing. It still has its devotees. It is still encountered in obscure places, where furtive secrecy is of the essence of the amatory preparations. In the folk mind in particular the love-potion can still be efficacious, sometimes grim in its attendant effects, but unquestionably an accepted and often employed means of directing erotic feelings, imposing amatory impulses, on a beloved victim, on the indifferent libertine, on the wayward and flighty girl. Ottokar Nemecek in his _Die Wertschätzung der Jungfräulichkeit_ (Verlag A. Sexl. Vienna, 1953) gives interesting instances of erotic practices, rituals, religious ceremonials, culled from many ethnic groups. In Fernando Po, for example, a prayer is offered: May the woman and the man become as erotically entwined as the creepers in the forest entwine around the tree trunks. In Ethiopia a phallic provocation was the wearing on the head of a band to which a horn was attached. Similarly among many African tribes, where the chief wore a phallus-crown with the same intention. As in Hellenic antiquity, in ancient India and in modern India also, the phallus is the symbol of might, of masculine sovereignty, of cosmic creativeness. Such customs and rites, such implicit amatory instigations, have not died out. They appear in many forms and guises, sometimes decorative, on other occasions in fanciful culinary shapes. Amulets and figures in phallic and genital form were sold, as late as 1894, in the shops of Tiflis, in Caucasia, and in the United States migrants from the Central European countries still reproduce, in their bake shops, festive genital formations. * * * * * Traditional potions, aphrodisiacs, and similar means of arousing genital impulses are in use even at the present time. Carrots, for instance, were long listed by the Arabs as a stimulant. In medieval Spain they were commonly consumed for such a purpose. And in the United States carrots are still reputed to have a marked erotic potency. * * * * * Current magazines of the more popular sort, contemporary drug stores have their amatory allurements. Some periodicals advertise exotic perfumes, sultry essences, seductive cosmetics and similar feminine accessories, or insidious unguents and lotions, whose avowed purpose is to attract men in an amorous direction. In the drug stores, hormones and gland extracts, transplantations and rejuvenative manipulations and operations are publicized for similar purposes.