The tactile kiss is certainly very ancient and primitive.  It is common among mammals generally.  The human infant exhibits, in a very marked degree, the impulse to carry everything to the mouth and to lick or attempt to taste it, possibly, as Compayre suggests,[198] from a memory of the action of the lips protruded to seize the maternal nipple.  The affectionate child, as Mantegazza remarks,[199] not only applies inanimate objects to its lips or tongue, but of its own impulse licks the people it likes.  Stanley Hall, in the light of a large amount of information he obtained on this point, found that “some children insist on licking the cheeks, necks, and hands of those they wish to caress,” or like having animals lick them.[200] This impulse in children may be associated with the maternal impulse in animals to lick the young.  “The method of licking the young practiced by the mother,” remarks S.S.  Buckman, “would cause licking to be associated with happy feelings.  And, further, there is the allaying of parasitical irritation which is afforded by the rubbing and hence results in pleasure.  It may even be suggested that the desire of the mother to lick her young was prompted in the first place by a desire to bestow on her offspring a pleasure she felt herself.”  The licking impulse in the child may thus, it is possible, be regarded as the evanescent manifestation of a more fundamental animal impulse,[201] a manifestation which is liable to appear in adult life under the stress of strong sexual emotion.  Such an association is of interest if, as there is some reason to believe, the kiss of sexual love originated as a development of the more primitive kiss bestowed by the mother on her child, for it is sometimes found that the maternal kiss is practiced where the sexual kiss is unknown.

The impulse to bite is also a part of the tactile element which lies at the origin of kissing.  As Stanley Hall notes, children are fond of biting, though by no means always as a method of affection.  There is, however, in biting a distinctly sexual origin to invoke, for among many animals the teeth (and among birds the bill) are used by the male to grasp the female more firmly during intercourse.  This point has been discussed in the previous volume of these Studies in reference to “Love and Pain,” and it is unnecessary to enter into further details here.  The heroine of Kleist’s Penthesilea remarks:  “Kissing (Kuesse) rhymes with biting (Bisse), and one who loves with the whole heart may easily confound the two.”

The kiss, as known in Europe, has developed on a sensory basis that is mainly tactile, although an olfactory element may sometimes coexist.  The kiss thus understood is not very widely spread and is not usually found among rude and uncultured peoples.  We can trace it in Aryan and Semitic antiquity, but in no very pronounced form; Homer scarcely knew it, and the Greek poets seldom mention it.  Today it may be said to be known all over Europe except in Lapland.