ern lands, has reached an
extraordinary degree of extent and variety we can only feebly estimate by
the occasional resulting mischances which come under the surgeon's hands,
because only a certain proportion of such instruments are dangerous. Thus
the banana seems to be widely used for masturbation by women, and appears
to be marked out for the purpose by its size and shape[195]; it is,
however, innocuous, and never comes under the surgeon's notice; the same
may probably be said of the cucumbers and other vegetables more especially
used by country and factory girls in masturbation; a lady living near
Vichy told Pouillet that she had often heard (and had herself been able to
verify the fact) that the young peasant women commonly used turnips,
carrots, and beet-roots. In the eighteenth century Mirabeau, in his
_Erotikca Biblion_ gave a list of the various objects used in convents
(which he describes as "vast theatres" of such practices) to obtain
solitary sexual excitement. In more recent years the following are a few
of the objects found in the vagina or bladder whence they could only be
removed by surgical interference[196]: Pencils, sticks of sealing-wax,
cotton-reels, hair-pins (and in Italy very commonly the bone-pins used in
the hair), bodkins, knitting-needles, crochet-needles, needle-cases,
compasses, glass stoppers, candles, corks, tumblers, forks, tooth-picks,
toothbrushes, pomade-pots (in a case recorded by Schroeder with a
cockchafer inside, a makeshift substitute for the Japanese _rin-no-tama_),
while in one recent English case a full-sized hen's egg was removed from
the vagina of a middle-aged married woman. More than nine-tenths of the
foreign bodies found in the female bladder or urethra are due to
masturbation. The age of the individuals in whom such objects have been
found is usually from 17 to 30, but in a few cases they have been found in
girls below 14, infrequently in women between 40 and 50; the large
objects, naturally, are found chiefly in the vagina, and in married
women.[197]

Hair-pins have, above all, been found in the female bladder with special
frequency; this point is worth some consideration as an illustration of
the enormous frequency of this form of auto-erotism. The female urethra is
undoubtedly a normal centre of sexual feeling, as Pouillet pointed out
many years ago; a woman medical correspondent, also, writes that in some
women the maximum of voluptuous sensation is at the vesical sph