With the Renaissance this ideal of beauty disappeared from art.  But in real life we still seem to trace its survival in the fashion for that class of garments which involved an immense amount of expansion below the waist and secured such expansion by the use of whalebone hoops and similar devices.  The Elizabethan farthingale was such a garment.  This was originally a Spanish invention, as indicated by the name (from verdugardo, provided with hoops), and reached England through France.  We find the fashion at its most extreme point in the fashionable dress of Spain in the seventeenth century, such as it has been immortalized by Velasquez.  In England hoops died out during the reign of George III but were revived for a time, half a century later, in the Victorian crinoline.[147]

Only second to the pelvis and its integuments as a secondary sexual character in woman we must place the breasts.[148] Among barbarous and civilized peoples the beauty of the breast is usually highly esteemed.  Among Europeans, indeed, the importance of this region is so highly esteemed that the general rule against the exposure of the body is in its favor abrogated, and the breasts are the only portion of the body, in the narrow sense, which a European lady in full dress is allowed more or less to uncover.  Moreover, at various periods and notably in the eighteenth century, women naturally deficient in this respect have sometimes worn artificial busts made of wax.  Savages, also, sometimes show admiration for this part of the body, and in the Papuan folk-tales, for instance, the sole distinguishing mark of a beautiful woman is breasts that stand up.[149] On the other hand, various savage peoples even appear to regard the development of the breasts as ugly and adopt devices for flattening this part of the body.[150] The feeling that prompts this practice is not unknown in modern Europe, for the Bulgarians are said to regard developed breasts as ugly; in mediaeval Europe, indeed, the general ideal of feminine slenderness was opposed to developed breasts, and the garments tended to compress them.  But in a very high degree of civilization this feeling is unknown, as, indeed, it is unknown to most barbarians, and the beauty of a woman’s breasts, and of any natural or artificial object which suggests the gracious curves of the bosom, is a universal source of pleasure.

The casual vision of a girl’s breasts may, in the chastest youth, evoke a strange perturbation. (Cf., e.g., a passage in an early chapter of Marcelle Tinayre’s La Maison du Peche.) We need not regard this feeling as of purely sexual origin; and in addition even to the aesthetic element it is probably founded to some extent on a reminiscence of the earliest associations of life.  This element of early association was very well set forth long ago by Erasmus Darwin:—­

“When the babe, soon after it is born into this cold world, is applied to its