or Hymenæus, a fabulous divinity, the son of Bacchus and Venus Urania, was supposed by the ancients to preside over marriages; and accordingly was invoked in epitalamiums, and other matrimonial ceremonies, under the formula, Hymen, or Hymenæe!
The poets generally crown this deity with a chaplet of roses; and represent him, as it were, dissolved and enervated with pleasures; dressed in a yellow robe, and shoes of the same colour; with a torch in his hand.—Catullus, in one of his epigrams, addresses him thus:
Cinge tempora floribus, Sudavolentis amarici.
It was for this reason, that the newly-married couple bore garlands of flowers on the wedding-day: which custom also obtained among the Hebrews, and even among Christians, during the first ages of the church, as appears from Tertullian, De corona militari, where he says, Coronant & nupta spongos.—S. Chrysostom likewise mentions these crowns of flowers; and to this day the Greeks call marriage ἑρακλεική, in respect of this crown or garland.
in anatomy, a thin membrane or skin, sometimes circular, of different breadths, more or less smooth, and sometimes semilunar, formed by the union of the internal membrane of the great canal with that on the inside of the alae, resembling a piece of fine parchment. This membrane is supposed to be stretched in the neck of the womb of virgins, below the nymphæ, leaving in some places a very small opening, in others larger, and in all rendering the external orifice narrower than the rest of the cavity, and to be broke when they are deflowered; an effusion of blood following the breach.
This membranous circle may likewise suffer some disorder by too great a flux of the menes, by imprudence, levity, and other particular accidents.
The hymen is generally looked upon as the test of virginity; and when broke, or withdrawn, shows that the person is not in a state of innocence. This notion is very ancient. Among the Hebrews, it was the custom for the parents to save the blood shed on this occasion as a token of the virginity of their daughter, and to send the sheets next day to the husband's relations. And the like is said to be still practiced in Portugal, and some other countries.
And yet authors are not agreed as to the existence of such a membrane. Nothing, Dr Drake observes, has employed the curiosity of anatomists, in dissecting the organs of generation in women, more than this part: they have differed not only as to its figure, substance, place, and perforation, but even its reality; some positively affirming, and others flatly denying it.
De Graaf himself, the most accurate inquirer into the structure of these organs, confesses he always sought it in vain, though in the most unsuspected subjects and ages: all he could find was, a different degree of straitness or wideness, and different corrugations, which were greater or less according to the respective ages; the aperture being still the least, and the rugosities the greatest, as the subject was younger and more untouched.
Dr Drake, on the other hand, declares, that in all the subjects he had opportunity to examine, he does not remember to have missed the hymen so much as once, where he had reason to depend on finding it. The fairest view he ever had of it was in a maid who died at thirty years of age; in this he found it a membrane of some strength, furnished with fleshy fibres, in figure round, and perforated in the middle with a small hole, capable of admitting the end of a woman's little finger, and situated a little above the orifice of the urinary passage, at the entrance of the vagina of the womb.
In infants, it is a finethin membrane, not very conspicuous, because of the natural straitness of the passage itself, which does not admit of any great expansion in so little room; which might lead De Graaf into a notion of its being no more than a corrugation.
This membrane, like most others, does probably grow more distinct, as well as firm, by age. That it not only exists, but is sometimes very strong and impervious, may be collected from the history of a case reported by Mr Cowper. In a married woman, twenty years of age, whose hymen was found altogether impervious, so as to detain the menses, and to be driven out by the pressure thereof beyond the labia of the pudendum, not unlike a prolapsus of the uterus; on dividing it, at least a gallon of grumous blood came forth.
It seems the husband, being denied a passage that way, had found another through the meatus urinarium; which was found very open, and its sides extruded like the anus of a cock.
Upon a rupture of the hymen, after the consummation of marriage, and especially delivery, its parts, shrinking up, are supposed to form those little fleshy knots, called CARUNCULÆ myrtiformes.
HYMENÆA, the BASTARD LOCUST TREE: A genus of the monogynia order, belonging to the decandra class of plants; and in the natural method ranking under the 33rd order, Lomentaceæ. The calyx is quinqupartite; there are five petals, nearly equal; the style is intorted; the legumen full of mealy pulp. There is but one species, the courbaril, which is a large tree, growing naturally in the Spanish West Indies. The trunk is covered with a light ash-coloured bark, is often more than 60 feet high and three in diameter. The branches are furnished with dark green leaves, which stand by pairs on one common footstalk, diverging from their base in manner of a pair of shears when opened. The flowers come out in loose spikes at the ends of the branches, and are yellow, striped with purple. Each consists of five petals, placed in a double calyx, the outer leaf of which is divided into five parts, and the inner one is cut into five teeth at its brim. In the centre are ten declining stamens, longer than the petals, surrounding an oblong germin, which becomes a thick, fleshy, brown pod, four or five inches long and one broad, with a future on both edges, and includes three or four purplish seeds, somewhat of the shape of Windsor beans, but smaller. The seeds are covered with a light brown sugary substance, which the Indians scrape off and eat with great avidity, and which is very pleasant and agreeable.—At the principal roots under ground, is found collected in large lumps a yellowish-red transparent gum, which dissolved in rectified spirit of wine affords a most excellent varnish, and is the gum anime of the shops.