_Sauval_ relates of the dissolute life at the court of the French king, Francis I, that the women learned also to play the part of men; a princess had a hermaphrodite maid-of-honor, and the court and all Paris gossiped about the Lesbian-loving ladies, whose husbands were delighted, since they were thus quite freed from jealousy, and prized their wives above all on this account. Such a mode of life was so pleasing to many ladies that they refused to marry, and refused also to allow their “friends” to marry. Tribadism is very common among prostitutes. According to _Parent-Duchatelet_, tribadism begins only after prostitution has long been practised, between the twenty-fifth and the thirtieth year of life; generally there is a notable difference in age and also in beauty between the two women forming a tribadistic alliance, and as a rule the younger and prettier of the pair is the more passionately sensitive and the more constant. _Parent-Duchatelet_ endeavours to explain the origin of tribadism by referring to the manner in which in brothels and reformatories the women are closely packed together, to the enforced abstinence from normal sexual intercourse (in prisons and reformatories), to the loathing for men sometimes felt by prostitutes, and to the opportunities for mutual observation of the most intimate nudities. Even women who at first object to it most vehemently, commonly give way to this vice after eighteen or twenty months. Among 103 prostitutes examined by _Lombroso_, he found tribadism to be practiced by five. He considers the principal cause of tribadism to be in the lascivious search for new and unnatural pleasures, and quotes in illustration the characteristic remark of Catharine II, herself a tribadist, “Why did not nature endow us with a sixth sense?” Female criminals who seduce others to the practice of tribadism have usually themselves acquired the vice during a long term of imprisonment—it is, in fact, the long-sentence criminals, women with a congenital inclination toward crime, that incline also to unnatural vice. The influence of environment is, according to _Lombroso_, indicated by the fact that the most confirmed criminals, in prisons for women, corrupt in this manner so many of the inmates who are merely “criminaloids,” and corrupt even the wardresses. Further, he is led to conclude, the confinement in close association of so many extremely sensual and prostituted women, leads to the origin of a kind of ferment of new lascivious desires, and causes an increase of one form of degeneracy by means of another. Prostitutes often see one another naked, sleep two or three together in the same bed; similar things occur in boarding-schools. In asylums also we may observe that the admission of a tribadist will result in the infection of all the inmates with this vice.