une Mission en Islande et aux lies Feroe,” Nouvelles Archives des Missions Scientifiques, tome vii, 1897, p. 285).  These dances, which are entirely decorous, include poetry, music, and much mimicry, especially of battle.  They sometimes last for two consecutive days and nights.  “The dance is simply a permitted and discreet method by which the young men may court the young girls.  The islander enters the circle and places himself beside the girl to whom he desires to show his affection; if he meets with her approval she stays and continues to dance at his side; if not, she leaves the circle and appears later at another spot.”

Pitre (Usi, etc., del Popolo Siciliano, vol. ii, p. 24, as quoted in Marro’s Puberta) states that in Sicily the youth who wishes to marry seeks to give some public proof of his valor and to show himself off.  In Chiaramonte, in evidence of his virile force, he bears in procession the standard of some confraternity, a high and richly adorned standard which makes its staff bend to a semicircle, of such enormous weight that the bearer must walk in a painfully bent position, his head thrown back and his feet forward.  On reaching the house of his betrothed he makes proof of his boldness and skill in wielding this extremely heavy standard which at this moment seems a plaything in his hands, but may yet prove fatal to him through injury to the loins or other parts.

This same tendency, which we find in so highly developed a degree among animals and primitive human peoples, is also universal among the children of even the most civilized human races, although in a less organized and more confused way.  It manifests itself as “showing-off.”  Sanford Bell, in his study of the emotion of love in children, finds that “showing-off” is an essential element in the love of children in what he terms the second stage (from the eighth to the twelfth year in girls and the fourteenth in boys).  “It constitutes one of the chief numbers in the boy’s repertory of love charms, and is not totally absent from the girl’s.  It is a most common sight to see the boys taxing their resources in devising means of exposing their own excellencies, and often doing the most ridiculous and extravagant things.  Running, jumping, dancing, prancing, sparring, wrestling, turning handsprings, somersaults, climbing, walking fences, swinging, giving yodels and yells, whistling, imitating the movements of animals, ‘taking people off,’ courting danger, affecting courage are some of its common forms....  This ‘showing-off’ in the boy lover is the forerunner of the skilful, purposive, and elaborate means of self-exhibition in the adult male and the charming coquetry in the adult female, in their love-relations.” (Sanford Bell, “The Emotion of Love Between the Sexes,” American Journal Psychology, July, 1902; cf.  “Showing-off and Bashfulness,” Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1903.)