Now if we separate the facts which are brought forward in this passage of Hippocrates from his attempted explanations, there can be no doubt that the same thing is in question here as that which Herodotus describes. There are men amongst the Scythians who behave as women, speak as women, perform women’s work and keep with the women, and their condition the Scythians consider as something sent by the deity, and for this reason honour and fear these men. All the rest is part of the attempted explanations of the author, who brings together every possible consideration in order to discover a natural cause of the phenomenon, leaving utterly and entirely unrecognized all the time the most natural cause of all. This of course was due to no other reason except that it was _unknown_ to him, and that he was acquainted with the circumstances not from his own observation, but only from hearsay. This is a conjecture which _Heyne_ (_loco citato_) had already made in his time, but which has met with many opponents, yet without the argument having ever been properly brought to the test of the evidence. In favour of Heyne’s view a passage from the book περὶ ἄρθρων (On Joints)[400] might be cited, in which the limping of the men of the Amazons in consequence of the dislocation of the limbs is clearly declared to be an unauthenticated myth; for which reason _Gruner_[401] denied Hippocrates’ authorship of this work in opposition to the general witness of Antiquity. But really and truly we are as well without the passage; for if what he relates were the result of his own observation, how could the author write in connexion with his remark that the Scythians bled themselves behind the ears, ταύτας τοίνυν _μοι δοκέουσι_ τὰς φλέβας ἐπιτάμνειν (now these are the veins, _as it seems to me_, that they cut)? Is the actual fact possibly, that all these attempted explanations flowed from the pen of some later, or of several later, writers? At any rate for ourselves, we have never yet been able to get rid of a suspicion to that effect. But be this as it may, so much at least is certain, as was stated above; viz. that the Author was unacquainted with the actual cause of attempts to explain it, probably from misunderstanding the effemination of the Scythians, and that all of the words ἀνανδρίες and εὐνουχίαι (unmanly, eunuch-like), aim at referring the loss of the generative power, i.e. ἀνανδρία in its strict sense, to some natural reason, while the effemination is looked upon merely as a secondary circumstance.