other uses which dancing possesses in primitive times and which cause it to occupy so large and vital a part in savage life that it may possibly even affect the organism to such an extent as to mold the bones; so that some authorities have associated platycnemia with dancing.  As civilization advances, the other uses of dancing fall away, but it still remains a sexual stimulant.  Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy, brings forward a number of quotations from old authors showing that dancing is an incitement to love.[41]

The Catholic theologians (Debreyne, Moechialogie, pp. 190-199) for the most part condemn dancing with much severity.  In Protestant Germany, also, it is held that dance meetings and musical gatherings are frequent occasions of unchastity.  Thus in the Leipzig district when a girl is asked “How did you fall?” she nearly always replies “At the dance.” (Die Geschlechtlich-Sittliche Verhaeltnisse im Deutschen Reiche, vol. i, p. 196.) It leads quite as often, and no doubt oftener, to marriage.  Rousseau defended it on this account (Nouvelle Heloise, bk. iv, letter x); dancing is, he held, an admirable preliminary to courtship, and the best way for young people to reveal themselves to each other, in their grace and decorum, their qualities and defects, while its publicity is its safeguard.  An International Congress of Dancing Masters was held at Barcelona in 1907.  In connection with this Congress, Giraudet, president of the International Academy of Dancing Masters, issued an inquiry to over 3000 teachers of dancing throughout the world in order to ascertain the frequency with which dancing led to marriage.  Of over one million pupils of dancing, either married or engaged to be married, it was found that in most countries more than 50 per cent. met their conjugal partners at dances.  The smallest proportion was in Norway, with only 39 per cent., and the highest, Germany, with 97 per cent.  Intermediate are France, 83 per cent.; America, 80 per cent.; Italy, 70 per cent.; Spain, 68 per cent.; Holland, Bulgaria, and England, 65 per cent.; Australia and Roumania, 60 per cent., etc.  Of the teachers themselves 92 per cent. met their partners at dances. (Quoted from the Figaro in Beiblatt “Sexualreform” to Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, 1907, p. 175.)

In civilization, however, dancing is not only an incitement to love and a preliminary to courtship, but it is often a substitute for the normal gratification of the sexual instinct, procuring something of the pleasure and relief of gratified love.  In occasional abnormal cases this may be consciously realized.  Thus Sadger, who regards the joy of dancing as a manifestation of “muscular eroticism,” gives the case of a married hysterical woman of 21, with genital anesthesia, but otherwise strongly developed skin eroticism, who was a passionate dancer:  “I often felt as though I was giving myself to my partner in dancing,” she said, “and was actually