Fortunately, ethnology furnishes us with incontrovertible proofs of genuine promiscuity. Of the Nasomoni in Africa, Herodotus (iv. 172) reports: “When a Nasomonian man takes his first wife, it is the custom that on the =first= night the bride should be visited by each of the guests in turn, and each one, as he leaves, gives her a present which he had brought with him to the house.” Diodorus Siculus makes a similar report regarding the inhabitants of the Balearic Islands (v. 18). Have we not here an echo of primeval custom, of sexual promiscuity prior to marriage? Very interesting are the accounts recently given by Melnikow regarding the free sexual relationships customary among the Siberian Buryats. There before marriage unregulated sexual intercourse between men and girls prevails. This is especially to be observed at festival seasons. Such festivals occur usually late in the evening, and can rightly be called “nights of love.” Near the villages bonfires are lighted, round which the men and women dance monotonous dances termed “nadan.” From time to time pairs separate from the thousands of dancers, and disappear into the darkness; soon they return and resume their place in the dance, to disappear again by and by into the obscurity; but they are not the same couples that disappear each time, =for they continually change partners=.[157] Is this not promiscuity? In a mitigated form we can see the same among ourselves. A case recently came under my notice in which two friends made an exchange of their “intimates”; moreover, the “intimacy” in each case had been of very brief duration. This, indeed, happened in the full light of day; while among the Buryats the darkness concealed a completely indiscriminate promiscuity. Marco Polo reports as a remarkable custom of the inhabitants of Thibet, that there a man would in no circumstances marry a girl who was a virgin, for they say a wife is worth nothing if she has not had intercourse with men. Girls were offered to the traveller, and he was expected to reward the courtesy with a ring or some other trifle, which the girl, when she wished to marry, would show as one of her “love-tokens.” =The more such tokens she possessed, the more she was in request as a wife.=[158] From New Holland we receive similar reports. Of especial importance, as proving the existence of sexual promiscuity, are the investigations of the student of folk-lore, Friedrich S. Krauss, regarding the sexual life of the Southern Slavs. Krauss has, indeed, rendered most valuable aids to the scientific study and anthropological foundation of the human sexual life; a place of honour among the founders of “anthropologia sexualis” must be given to Krauss, and also to Bastian, Post, Kohler, Mantegazza, and Ploss-Bartels.