elite of the bathers, while our Sunday visitors from the slums frequently made a great point of wearing bathing costumes; it was frequently noticed that those who were most anxious to avoid exposing their persons were distinguished by the foulness of their language.  My impression was that their foul-mindedness deprived them of the consciousness of safety from coarse jests.  If I were bathing alone among blackguards, I should probably feel uncomfortable myself, if without costume.” (Private communication.)

A lady in a little city of the south of Italy, told Paola Lombroso that young middle-class girls there are not allowed to go out except to Mass, and cannot even show themselves at the window except under their mother’s eye; yet they do not think it necessary to have a cabin when sea-bathing, and even dispense with a bathing costume without consciousness of immodesty. (P.  Lombroso, Archivio di Psichiatria, 1901, p. 306.)

“A woman mentioned to me that a man came to her and told her in confidence his distress of mind:  he feared he had corrupted his wife because she got into a bath in his presence, with her baby, and enjoyed his looking at her splashing about.  He was deeply distressed, thinking he must have done her harm, and destroyed her modesty.  The woman to whom this was said felt naturally indignant, but also it gave her the feeling as if every man may secretly despise a woman for the very things he teaches her, and only meets her confiding delight with regret or dislike.”  (Private communication.)

“Women will occasionally be found to hide diseases and symptoms from a bashfulness and modesty so great and perverse as to be hardly credible,” writes Dr. W. Wynn Westcott, an experienced coroner.  “I have known several cases of female deaths, reported as sudden, and of cause unknown, when the medical man called in during the latter hours of life has been quite unaware that his lady patient was dying of gangrene of a strangulated femoral hernia, or was bleeding to death from the bowel, or from ruptured varices of the vulva.” (British Medical Journal, Feb. 29, 1908.)

The foregoing selection of facts might, of course, be indefinitely enlarged, since I have not generally quoted from any previous collection of facts bearing on the question of modesty.  Such collections may be found in Ploss and Max Bartels Das Weib, a work that is constantly appearing in new and enlarged editions; Herbert Spencer, Descriptive Sociology (especially under such headings as “Clothing,” “Moral Sentiments,” and “AEsthetic Products"); W.G.  Sumner, Folkways, Ch.  XI; Mantegazza, Amori degli Uomini, Chapter II; Westermarck, Marriage, Chapter IX; Letourneau, L’Evolution de la Morale, pp. 126 et seq.; G. Mortimer, Chapters on Human Love, Chapter IV; and in the general anthropological works of Waitz-Gerland, Peschel, Ratzel and others.

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