The onset and termination of menstruation is subject, like all other sexual phenomena, to immense variation. It has been known for a girl to start menstruating at three months old (H. Jolly in "Sexual Precocity", Proc. Royal Soc. Med. 44, 1951), and occasionally the menopause too occurs at a very early age: there are instances of girls reaching the menopause before the age of twenty. The menopause rarely occurs after the age of fifty-five but rare cases do occur. In one instance menstruation was continuing in a woman aged 104.

When we survey all the sex aid paraphernalia in the modern magazines we may be forgiven for thinking that such things are a product of modern "permissiveness."

Clearly the ancient Romans did not have the opportunity to play around with electronic vibrators - but they had a variety of gadgets that have hardly been surpassed today. And even older peoples have used sex aid devices, e.g. dildoes.

In the average human ejaculate there are several hundred million live and mobile sperm. The older a man gets the fewer sperm he manages to manufacture. By the age of eighty or ninety most men are infertile, though they often have enjoyable sex lives.

In a few relatively isolated communities old men appear to sire offspring with great success, a facility that appears to be associated with great longevity - as, for instance, in Georgia in the USSR and in the valley of Vilcabamba in Ecuador. I have yet to see studies of fertility in old men in these communities.

There is a rich ancient literature dealing with various aspects of non-coital sex technique.

Kinsey cites dozens of references to "non-coital petting techniques." For instance, there are ancient Near Eastern documents dating back to the second millennium B.C., and in Ezekiel XXIII, 3 it is recorded that as people committed 'whoredoms' in various places, "there were their breasts pressed, and there they bruised the teats of their virginity."

All relevant surveys have shown men and women still having sexual intercourse when in their eighties or even nineties, though around three-quarters of all men are impotent by the time they reach their eighties. The oldest potent male in the Kinsey survey was an 88-year-old Negro, who continued to enjoy regular sexual intercourse with his ninety-year-old wife! It should be said that some cases of impotence in old men are certainly due to the absence of adequate stimulation: though it is arguable that sudden stimulation to orgasm in an old man could prove fatal as has happened.

Dioscrides being handed a mandrake uprooted by a dog, which dies in the process.

Some aphrodisiacs have been popular since the days of antiquity. The mandrake plant is mentioned in the Old Testament and is still in use today.

Mandrake (or madragora, mandragora officinarum) is a member of the potato family with a large dark-brown root and small red fruit. It contains the alkaloids atropine and scopolomine: in mild doses these are soporifics in larger doses they can kill! In antiquity there were magical rules for harvesting the plant.

Mae West has been portrayed as one of the very few stars who was "self-made and self-sustaining," owing her success to herself alone, not to a director, scriptwriter, make-up artist, or photographer. What is perhaps most remarkable about her is that she first arrived at Hollywood when she was forty years of age - "grotesquely late to begin a film career".

The oldest sex manuals in the world can be traced to China, more than two and a half thousand years before the birth of Christ. Huang-Ti (2697-2598 B.C.), the legendary Yellow Emperor, has been regarded as the originator of the traditional sex practices and beliefs. The ancient "Handbooks of Sex," composed nearly five thousand years ago, anticipate anything produced in the West by well over two thousand years.

According to some authorities the most ancient Chinese representations of sexual subject matter date from the Tan dynasty (ca. 206 B.C.-A.D. 24) "Excavations from that period have unearthed bricks from tombs and gifts buried with the dead which show definite sexual motifs." In view of the great antiquity of other aspects of Chinese erotic life these sexual motifs do not seem particularly ancient. The sexual manuals in China suggest that various forms of sexual imagery would have been employed two or three thousand years before the birth of Christ.

The oldest and best known Indian sex manual is the "Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana", written about 1500 years ago.