rebro-Spinal and Sympathetic Systems," _New York Medical
Journal_, March 11, 1893; id., _The Abdominal Brain_, 1899.)

Of all the sexual organs the penis is without doubt that which has most
powerfully impressed the human imagination. It is the very emblem of
generation, and everywhere men have contemplated it with a mixture of
reverence and shuddering awe that has sometimes, even among civilized
peoples, amounted to horror and disgust. Its image is worn as an amulet to
ward off evil and invoked as a charm to call forth blessing. The sexual
organs were once the most sacred object on which a man could place his
hands to swear an inviolate oath, just as now he takes up the Testament.
Even in the traditions of the great classic civilization which we inherit
the penis is _fascinus_, the symbol of all fascination. In the history of
human culture it has had far more than a merely human significance; it has
been the symbol of all the generative force of Nature, the embodiment of
creative energy in the animal and vegetable worlds alike, an image to be
held aloft for worship, the sign of all unconscious ecstasy. As a symbol,
the sacred phallus, it has been woven in and out of all the highest and
deepest human conceptions, so intimately that it is possible to see it
everywhere, that it is possible to fail to see it anywhere.

In correspondence with the importance of the penis is the large number of
names which men have everywhere bestowed upon it. In French literature
many hundred synonyms may be found. They were also numerous in Latin. In
English the literary terms for the penis seem to be comparatively few, but
a large number of non-literary synonyms exist in colloquial and perhaps
merely local usage. The Latin term penis, which has established itself
among us as the most correct designation, is generally considered to be
associated with _pendere_ and to be connected therefore with the usually
pendent position of the organ. In the middle ages the general literary
term throughout Europe was _coles_ (or _colis_) from _caulis_, a stalk,
and _virga_, a rod. The only serious English literary term, yard (exactly
equivalent to _virga_), as used by Chaucer--almost the last great English
writer whose vocabulary was adequate to the central facts of life--has now
fallen out of literary and even colloquial usage.

Pierer and Chaulant, in their anatomical and physiological
_Real-Lexicon_ (vol. vi, p. 134), give nearly a hundred