were hermaphrodites. Neither
the explorers nor their European historiographers seem able to have
grasped the true state of affairs. Many believed in the actual existence
of such numbers of these monstrosities, while others, arguing from what
was then known regarding the extraordinary development of the nymphae and
clitoris, as well as of the great labia, of the women in the African
regions, concluded that these supposed _androgynes_, or hermaphrodites,
must be women, the dress assumed by these and the menial labors to which
they were consigned assisting to favor this opinion. The early
Franciscan missionaries to California found the men who were used for
pederasty dressed as women.[39] Hammond mentions the practice as in
vogue among the Indians of the southwest, which in a measure greatly
resembled that of the ancient Scythians in its operation, the men being
dressed as women, associating with women, and used for pederastic
purposes during the orgies of their festivals. These men had previously
been eunuchised by a process of continued and persistent onanism, which
caused at the end a complete atrophization of the testicle.

In regard to the great number of hermaphrodites observed in Florida and
on the Mississippi, the accounts are only reliable as far as they were
present in female garb and in an apparent state of slavery, being
compelled to do all the menial labor of the villages and camps, besides
being used for pederasty, no examination having been made by any
traveler. Their lot was different from those described by Hammond in his
work on "Male Impotence," where the whole transaction seems to have some
sort of religious and civil significance. In Florida, however, they
tilled the ground, extricated and carried off the dead during a battle,
and did all the work generally, being used for beasts of burden and not
allowed to cut their hair; but all authorities are silent or in complete
ignorance as to whether they had suffered castration. Pere Lafiteau,
however, gives an explanation which was in the last century considered
ridiculous, but which, in the light that has been thrown on the
existence of a former continent, and of the undisputable relation that
must, some ages in the past, have existed between Phoenicia and Central
America, seems a strongly probable solution of these customs. The Father
accounts for the presence of these American _androgynes_ in the
following manner: The Carribeans, or Caribs, were originall