when her attendant gently scratched her back, which seemed to excite the sexual appetite, to lie down on the ground, lift up the velabrum, and exhibit and protrude the vulva, seeing which the male, straightway inflamed with a like œstrum, mounted, one foot being kept firm on the ground, the other set upon the back of the prostrate female; the immense penis (you might imagine it a neat’s tongue!) vibrated backwards and forwards, and the process of intercourse was accompanied with much ado in murmuring and noise--the heads of the creatures being at the same time frequently thrust out and retracted--and other indications of enjoyment. Nor is it peculiar to birds, but common to animals at large, that, wagging the tail and protruding the genital parts, they prepare for the access of the male. And, indeed, the tail in the majority of animals has almost the same office as the velabrum in the common fowl; unless it were raised or drawn aside, it would interfere with the discharge of the fæces and the access of the male. In the female red-deer, fallow-deer, roe, and others of the more temperate animals, there is a corresponding protection to their private parts, a membranous velabrum covering the vulva and meatus urinarius, which must be raised before the penis of the male can be introduced. In animals that have a tail, moreover, parturition could not take place unless this part were lifted up; and even the human female is assisted in her labour by having the coccyx anointed and drawn outwards with the finger. A surgeon, a trustworthy man, and with whom I am upon intimate terms, on his return from the East Indies informed me, in perfect sincerity, that some inland and mountainous parts of the island of Borneo are still inhabited by a race of caudate human beings (a circumstance of which we also read in Pausanias), one of whom, a virgin, who had only been captured with great difficulty, for they live in the woods, he himself had seen, with a tail, thick, fleshy, and a span in length, reflected between the buttocks, and covering the anus and pudenda: so regularly has nature willed to cover these parts. To return. The structure of the velabrum in the fowl is like that of the upper eyelid; that is to say, it is a fleshy and muscular fold of the skin, having fibres extending from the circumference on every side towards the centre; its inner surface, like that of the eyelid and prepuce, being soft. Along its margin also there is a semicircular tarsus, after the manner of that of the eyelid; and in addition, between the skin and fleshy membrane, an interposed cartilage, extending from the root of the rump, the sickle-shaped tarsus being connected with it at right angles, (very much as we observe a small tail comprehended between the wing on either side, in bats). By this structure the velabrum is enabled more readily to open and close the foramina pudendi that have been mentioned.