nuptial couch.  It is dangerous even to see dangerous persons.  Sight is a method of contagion in primitive science, and the idea coincides with the psychological aversion to see dangerous things, and with sexual shyness and timidity.  In the customs noticed, we can distinguish the feeling that it is dangerous to the bride for her husband’s eyes to be upon her, and the feeling of bashfulness in her which induces her neither to see him nor to be seen by him.  These ideas explain the origin of the bridal veil and similar concealments.  The bridal veil is used, to take a few instances, in China, Burmah, Corea, Russia, Bulgaria, Manchuria, and Persia, and in all these cases it conceals the face entirely.” (E.  Crawley, The Mystic Rose, pp. 328 et seq.)

Alexander Walker, writing in 1846, remarks:  “Among old-fashioned people, of whom a good example may be found in old country people of the middle class in England, it is indecent to be seen with the head unclothed; such a woman is terrified at the chance of being seen In that condition, and if intruded on at that time, she shrieks with terror, and flies to conceal herself.” (A.  Walker, Beauty, p. 15.) This fear of being seen with the head uncovered exists still, M. Van Gennep informs me, in some regions of France, as in Brittany.

So far it has only been necessary to refer incidentally to the connection of modesty with clothing.  I have sought to emphasize the unquestionable, but often forgotten, fact that modesty is in its origin independent of clothing, that physiological modesty takes precedence of anatomical modesty, and that the primary factors of modesty were certainly developed long before the discovery of either ornament or garments.  The rise of clothing probably had its first psychical basis on an emotion of modesty already compositely formed of the elements we have traced.  Both the main elementary factors, it must be noted, must naturally tend to develop and unite in a more complex, though—­it may well be—­much less intense, emotion.  The impulse which leads the female animal, as it leads some African women when found without their girdles, to squat firmly down on the earth, becomes a more refined and extended play of gesture and ornament and garment.  A very notable advance, I may remark, is made when this primary attitude of defence against the action of the male becomes a defence against his eyes.  We may thus explain the spread of modesty to various parts of the body, even when we exclude the more special influence of the evil eye.  The breasts very early become a focus of modesty in women; this may be observed among many naked, or nearly naked, negro races; the tendency of the nates to become the chief seat of modesty in many parts of Africa may probably be, in large part, thus explained, since the full development of the gluteal regions is often the greatest attraction an African woman can possess.[47] The same cause contributes, doubtless, to the face becoming, in some races, the centre of modesty.  We see the influence of this defence against strange eyes in the special precautions in gesture or clothing taken by the women in various parts of the world, against the more offensive eyes of civilized Europeans.