xpress and help to purify his most perennial
emotion." (Colin Scott, "Sex and Art," _American Journal of
Psychology_, vol. vii, No. 2, p. 189.)

In the study of "Love and Pain" in a previous volume, the analysis of the
large and complex mass of sexual phenomena which are associated with pain,
gradually resolved them to a considerable extent into a special case of
erotic symbolism; pain or restraint, whether inflicted on or by the loved
person, becomes, by a psychic process that is usually unconscious, the
symbol of the sexual mechanism, and hence arouses the same emotions as
that mechanism normally arouses. We may now attempt to deal more broadly
and comprehensively with the normal and abnormal aspects of erotic
symbolism in some of their most typical and least mixed forms.

"When our human imagination seeks to animate artificial things," Huysmans
writes in _La-bas_, "it is compelled to reproduce the movements of animals
in the act of propagation. Look at machines, at the play of pistons in the
cylinders; they are Romeos of steel in Juliets of cast-iron." And not only
in the work of man's hands but throughout Nature we find sexual symbols
which are the less deniable since, for the most part, they make not the
slightest appeal to even the most morbid human imagination. Language is
full of metaphorical symbols of sex which constantly tend to lose their
poetic symbolism and to become commonplace. Semen is but seed, and for the
Latins especially the whole process of human sex, as well as the male and
female organs, constantly presented itself in symbols derived from
agricultural and horticultural life. The testicles were beans (_fabae_) and
fruit or apples (_poma_ and _mala_); the penis was a tree (_arbor_), or a
stalk (_thyrsus_), or a root (_radix_), or a sickle (_falx_), or a
ploughshare (_vomer_). The semen, again, was dew (_ros_). The labia majora
or minora were wings (_alae_); the vulva and vagina were a field (_ager_
and _campus_), or a ploughed furrow (_sulcus_), or a vineyard (_vinea_),
or a fountain (_fons_), while the pudendal hair was herbage
(_plantaria_).[4] In other languages it is not difficult to trace similar
and even identical imagery applied to sexual organs and sexual acts. Thus
it is noteworthy that Shakespeare more than once applies the term
"ploughed" to a woman who has had sexual intercourse. The Talmud calls the
labia minora the doors, the labia majora hinges, and the clitoris the key.
The