The Hos, an Indian hill tribe, have, as we are informed by Colonel Dalton, every year a great feast in January, “when the granaries are full of grain, and the people, to use their own expression, full of devilry. They have a strange notion that at this period, men and women are so over-charged with vicious propensities, that it is absolutely necessary for the safety of the person to let off steam by allowing for a time full vent to the passions. The festival, therefore, becomes a saturnalia, during which servants forget their duty to their masters, children their reverence for parents, men their respect for women, and women all notions of modesty, delicacy, and gentleness.” Men and women become almost like animals in the indulgence of their amorous propensities, and the utmost liberty is given to the girls.[144] The same writer adds that “it would appear that most Hill Tribes have found it necessary to promote marriage by stimulating intercourse between the sexes at particular seasons of the year.”[145] Among the Santals, “the marriages mostly take place once a year, in January; for six days all the candidates for matrimony live in promiscuous concubinage, after which the whole party are supposed to have paired off as man and wife.”[146] The Punjas in Jeypore, according to Dr. Shortt, have a festival in the first month of the new year, where men and women assemble. The lower order or castes observe this festival, which is kept up for a month, by both sexes mixing promiscuously, and taking partners as their choice directs.[147] A similar feast, comprising a continuous course of debauchery and licentiousness, is held once a year, by the Kotars, a tribe inhabiting the Neilgherries;[148] according to Mr. Bancroft, by the Keres in New Mexico;[149] according to Dr. Fritsch, by the Hottentots;[150] according to the Rev. H. Rowley, by the Kafirs;[151] and, as I am informed by Mr. A. J. Swann, by some tribes near Nyassa. Writers of the sixteenth century speak of the existence of certain early festivals in Russia, at which great license prevailed. According to Pamphill, these annual gatherings took place, as a rule, at the end of June, the day before the festival of St. John the Baptist, which, in pagan times, was that of a divinity known by the name of Jarilo, corresponding to the Priapus of the Greeks.[152] At Rome, a festival in honour of Venus took place in the month of April;[153] and Mannhardt mentions some curious popular customs in Germany, England, Esthonia and other European countries, which seem to indicate an increase of the sexual instinct in spring or at the beginning of summer.[154]