could not possibly eat pineapple; persuasion was useless; the fruit had to be taken away and the windows opened, for the very smell of it had become odious.  The Duchess adds that henceforth, throughout her life, though still liking the flavor, she was only able to eat pineapple by doing a sort of violence to herself. (Memories de la Duchesse d’Abrantes, vol. iii, Chapter VIII.) It should be added that, in old age, the Duchess d’Abrantes appears to have become insane.

The influence of suggestion must certainly be accepted as, at all events, increasing and emphasizing the tendency to longings.  It can scarcely, however, be regarded as a radical and adequate explanation of the phenomenon generally.  If it is a matter of auto-suggestion due to a tradition, then we should expect to find longings most frequent and most pronounced in multiparous women, who are best acquainted with the tradition and best able to experience all that is expected of a pregnant woman.  But, as a matter of fact, the women who have borne most children are precisely those who are least likely to be affected by the longings which tradition demands they should manifest.  Giles has shown that longings occur much more frequently in the first than in any subsequent pregnancy; there is a regular decrease with the increase in number of pregnancies until in women with ten or more children the longings scarcely occur at all.

We must probably regard longings as based on a physiological and psychic tendency which is of universal extension and almost or quite normal.  They are known throughout Europe and were known to the medical writers of antiquity.  Old Indian as well as old Jewish physicians recognized them.  They have been noted among many savage races to-day:  among the Indians of North and South America, among the peoples of the Nile and the Soudan, in the Malay archipelago.[185] In Europe they are most common among the women of the people, living simple and natural lives.[186]

The true normal relationship of the longings of pregnancy is with the impulsive and often irresistible longings for food delicacies which are apt to overcome children, and in girls often persist or revive through adolescence and even beyond.  Such sudden fits of greediness belong to those kind of normal psychic manifestations which are on the verge of the abnormal into which they occasionally pass.  They may occur, however, in healthy, well-bred, and well-behaved children who, under the stress of the sudden craving, will, without compunction and apparently without reflection, steal the food they long for or even steal from their parents the money to buy it.  The food thus seized by a well-nigh irresistible craving is nearly always a fruit.  Fruit is usually doled out to children in small quantities as a luxury, but we are descended from primitive human peoples and still more remote ape-like ancestors, by whom fruit was in its season eaten copiously, and it is not surprising that when that season comes round the child, more sensitive than the adult to primitive influences, should sometimes experience the impulse of its ancestors with overwhelming intensity, all the more so if, as is probable, the craving is to some extent the expression of a physiological need.