In consequence of this a law was promulgated forbidding the corpses of noble and beautiful women to be given into the hands of the embalmer until three or four days after their decease. And who does not know the story of the Venus of Cnidos, the work of Praxiteles, as related by Pliny, _Historia Naturalis_, XXXVI., ch. 5: “It is related how a certain youth fell in love with her, and having hidden himself one night in the temple, cohabited with the statue, leaving a stain as the mark of the gratification of his passion upon the marble.” There is a similarity in this with the mistake made by a bull which, according to Valerius Maximum, VIII., ch. II., fell in love with a bronze cow, and copulated with the same at Syracuse, being deceived by the perfection of the resemblance. FOOTNOTES - OF MASTURBATION ----- Footnote 91: Martial had made use of the same interrogative phrase with the verb in the infinitive and _puta_ put instead of _scilicet_ also in Epigram III., 26. _Hoc me puta velle negare?_ (Can I say nay to this?) Scholars have found occasion for a pile of annotations on the two passages: these need not detain us. Footnote 92: Martial’s meaning is: My left hand will console my suffering mentula; the business done, my hand covered with the ejaculation of the sperm, like the fleece on the pubis of Ravola in Juvenal, IX., 4,—if indeed it is the fleece of his pubis that is intended: “Whilst Ravola with wet beard rubs the groin of Rhodopé” ... the greedy cinede will be told to go to the deuce, to slink off with drooping head, like the man in Horace (_Satires_ II., 69), who finds: “Nothing is left to him and his but to weep.” This moist hand reminds us of the adulterous woman in Juvenal, XI., 186, who: “Show humid traces in the doubtful pleats of her tunic.” Footnote 93: Suidas under the word *****, after Aelius Dionysius apparently. Footnote 94: