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.

The venereal feeling also proceeds from different causes; in men from
the desire of emission, and in women from the desire of reception. All
these things, then, considered I cannot but wonder, he adds, how any one