CHAPTER X
Virginity, what it is, in what it consists, and how vitiated; together with the Opinions of the Learned about the Change of Sex in the Womb, during the Operation of Nature in forming the Body.
There are many ignorant people that boast of their skill in the knowledge of virginity, and some virgins have undergone harsh censures through their ignorant conclusions; I therefore thought it highly necessary to clear up this point, that the towering imaginations of conceited ignorance might be brought down, and the fair sex (whose virtues are so illustriously bright that they excite our wonder and command our imitation), may be freed from the calumnies and detractions of ignorance and envy; and so their honour may continue as unspotted, as they have kept their persons uncontaminated and free from defilement.
Virginity, in a strict sense, signifies the prime, the chief, the best of anything; and this makes men so desirous of marrying virgins, imagining some secret pleasure is to be enjoyed in their embraces, more than in those of widows, or of such as have been lain with before, though not many years ago, a very great personage thought
differently, and to use his own expression:—"The getting a maidenhead was such a piece of drudgery, that it was fitter for a coal heaver than a prince." [[1]] But this was only his opinion, for I am sure that other men think differently.
The curious inquirers into the secrets of Nature, have observed, that in young maidens in the sinus pudoris, or in what is called the neck of the womb, is that wonderful production usually called the hymen, but in French bouton de rose, or rosebud, because it resembles the expanded bud of a rose or a gilly flower. From this the word defloro, or, deflower, is derived, and hence taking away virginity is called deflowering a virgin, most being of the opinion that the virginity is altogether lost when this membrane is fractured and destroyed by violence; when it is found perfect and entire, however, no penetration has been effected; and in the opinion of some learned physicians there is neither hymen nor expanded skin which contains blood in it, which some people think, flows from the ruptured membrane at the first time of sexual intercourse.
Now this claustrum virginale, or flower, is composed of four little buds like myrtle berries, which are full and plump in virgins, but hang
loose and flag in women; and these are placed in the four angles of the sinus pudoris, joined together by little membranes and ligatures, like fibres, each of them situated in the testicles, or spaces between each bud, with which, in a manner, they are proportionately distended, and when once this membrane is lacerated, it denotes Devirgination. Thus many ignorant people, finding their wives defective in this respect on the first night, have immediately suspected their chastity, concluding that another man had been there before them, when indeed, such a rupture may happen in several ways accidentally, as well as by sexual intercourse, viz. by violent straining, coughing, or sneezing, the stoppage of the urine, etc., so that the entireness or the fracture of that which is commonly taken for a woman's virginity or maidenhead, is no absolute sign of immorality, though it is more frequently broken by copulation than by any other means. [[2]]
And now to say something of the change of the sexes in the womb. The genital parts of the sexes are so unlike each other in substance, composition, situation, figure, action and use that nothing is more unlike to each other than they are, and the more, all parts of the body (the breasts excepted, which in women swell, because Nature ordained them for suckling the infant) have an exact resemblance to each other, so much the more do the genital parts of one sex differ, when compared with the other, and if they be thus different in form, how much more are they so in their use.