"When our human imagination seeks to animate artificial things," Huysmans writes in _Là-bas_, "it is compelled to reproduce the movements of animals in the act of propagation. Look at machines, at the play of pistons in the cylinders; they are Romeos of steel in Juliets of cast-iron." And not only in the work of man's hands but throughout Nature we find sexual symbols which are the less deniable since, for the most part, they make not the slightest appeal to even the most morbid human imagination. Language is full of metaphorical symbols of sex which constantly tend to lose their poetic symbolism and to become commonplace. Semen is but seed, and for the Latins especially the whole process of human sex, as well as the male and female organs, constantly presented itself in symbols derived from agricultural and horticultural life. The testicles were beans (_fabæ_) and fruit or apples (_poma_ and _mala_); the penis was a tree (_arbor_), or a stalk (_thyrsus_), or a root (_radix_), or a sickle (_falx_), or a ploughshare (_vomer_). The semen, again, was dew (_ros_). The labia majora or minora were wings (_alæ_); the vulva and vagina were a field (_ager_ and _campus_), or a ploughed furrow (_sulcus_), or a vineyard (_vinea_), or a fountain (_fons_), while the pudendal hair was herbage (_plantaria_).[4] In other languages it is not difficult to trace similar and even identical imagery applied to sexual organs and sexual acts. Thus it is noteworthy that Shakespeare more than once applies the term "ploughed" to a woman who has had sexual intercourse. The Talmud calls the labia minora the doors, the labia majora hinges, and the clitoris the key. The Greeks appear not only to have found in the myrtle-berry, the fruit of a plant sacred to Venus, the image of the clitoris, but also in the rose an image of the feminine labia; in the poetic literature of many countries, indeed, this imagery of the rose may be traced in a more or less veiled manner.[5]