or HYMENAEUS, a fabulous divinity, the son of Bacchus and Venus Urania, was supposed by the ancients to preside over marriages; and accordingly was invoked in epithalamiums, and other matrimonial ceremonies, under the formula Hymen, or Hymenaei.
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 Suaveolentis amaraci.
It was for this reason, that the new 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 et nuptae sponsor.—S. Chrysostom likewise mentions these crowns of flowers; and to this day the Greeks call marriage ἐπιθαλαμία, in respect of this crown or garland.
'τεν, 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 ala, resembling a piece of fine parchment. This membrane is supposed to be stretched in the neck of the wombs of virgins, below the nymphæ, leaving in some subjects a very small opening, Hymen, in others a 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.
The membranous circle may likewise suffer some disorder by too great a flux of the menses, 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The hymen is generally looked upon as the test of virginity; and when broke, or withdrawn, shows that the person is not in a state of innocence.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 practised 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 less, and the rugosities the greater, 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 fine thin 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 imperious, 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 urinarius; which was found very open, and its sides extended like the anns 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 *carunculae myrtiformes*.