Woods Hutchinson (Studies in Human and Comparative Pathology, 1901, Chapters vii and VIII) has admirably set forth the immense importance of the skin, as in the first place “a tissue which is silk to the touch, the most exquisitely beautiful surface in the universe to the eye, and yet a wall of adamant against hostile attack.  Impervious alike, by virtue of its wonderful responsive vitality, to moisture and drought, cold and heat, electrical changes, hostile bacteria, the most virulent of poisons and the deadliest of gases, it is one of the real Wonders of the World.  More beautiful than velvet, softer and more pliable than silk, more impervious than rubber, and more durable under exposure than steel, well-nigh as resistant to electric currents as glass, it is one of the toughest and most dangerproof substances in the three kingdoms of nature” (although, as this author adds, we “hardly dare permit it to see the sunlight or breathe the open air").  But it is more than this.  It is, as Woods Hutchinson expresses it, the creator of the entire body; its embryonic infoldings form the alimentary canal, the brain, the spinal cord, while every sense is but a specialization of its general organic activity.  It is furthermore a kind of “skin-heart,” promoting the circulation by its own energy; it is the great heat-regulating organ of the body; it is an excretory organ only second to the kidneys, which descend from it, and finally it still remains the seat of touch.

It may be added that the extreme beauty of the skin as a surface is very clearly brought out by the inadequacy of the comparisons commonly used in order to express its beauty.  Snow, marble, alabaster, ivory, milk, cream, silk, velvet, and all the other conventional similes furnish surfaces which from any point of view are incomparably inferior to the skin itself. (Cf.  Stratz, Die Schoenheit des Weiblichen Koerpers, Chapter xii.)

With reference to the extraordinary vitality of the skin, emphasized by Woods Hutchinson, it may be added that, when experimenting on the skin with the electric current, Waller found that healthy skin showed signs of life ten days or more after excision.  It has been found also that fragments of skin which have been preserved in sterile fluid for even as long as nine months may still be successfully transplanted on to the body. (British Medical Journal, July 19, 1902.)

Everything indicates, remark Stanley Hall and Donaldson ("Motor Sensations in the Skin,” Mind, 1885), that the skin is “not only the primeval and most reliable source of our knowledge of the external world or the archaeological field of psychology,” but a field in which work may shed light on some of the most fundamental problems of psychic action.  Groos (Spiele der Menschen, pp. 8-16) also deals with the primitive character of touch sensations.

Touch sensations are without doubt the