While the contemplation of animal coitus is an easily intelligible and in early life, perhaps, an almost normal symbol of sexual emotion, there is another subdivision of this group of animal fetichisms which forms a more natural transition from the fetichisms which have their center in the human body:  the stuff-fetichisms, or the sexual attraction exerted by various tissues, perhaps always of animal origin.  Here we are in the presence of a somewhat complicated phenomenon.  In part we have, in a considerable number of such cases, the sexual attraction of feminine garments, for all such tissues are liable to enter into the dress.  In part, also, we have a sexual perversion of tactile sensibility, for in a considerable proportion of these cases it is the touch sensations which are potent in arousing the erotic sensations.  But in part, also, it would seem, we have here the conscious or subconscious presence of an animal fetich, and it is notable that perhaps all these stuffs, and especially fur, which is by far the commonest of the groups, are distinctively animal products.  We may perhaps regard the fetich of feminine hair—­a much more important and common fetich, indeed, than any of the stuff fetichisms—­as a link of transition.  Hair is at once an animal and a human product, while it may be separated from the body and possesses the qualities of a stuff.  Krafft-Ebing remarks that the senses of touch, smell, and hearing, as well as sight, seem to enter into the attraction exerted by hair.

The natural fascination of hair, on which hair-fetichism is founded, begins at a very early age.  “The hair is a special object of interest with infants,” Stanley Hall concludes, “which begins often in the latter part of the first year....  The hair, no doubt, gives quite unique tactile sensations, both in its own roots and to hands, and is plastic and yielding to the motor sense, so that the earliest interest may be akin to that in fur, which is a marked object in infant experience.  Some children develop an almost fetichistic propensity to pull or later to stroke the hair or beard of every one with whom they come in contact.” (G.  Stanley Hall, “The Early Sense of Self,” American Journal of Psychology, April, 1898, p. 359.)

It should be added that the fascination of hair for the infantile and childish mind is not necessarily one of attraction, but may be of repulsion.  It happens here, as in the case of so many characteristics which are of sexual significance, that we are in the presence of an object which may exert a dynamic emotional force, a force which is capable of repelling with the same energy that it attracts.  Fere records the instructive case of a child of 3, of psychopathic heredity, who when he could not sleep was sometimes taken by his mother into her bed.  One night his hand came in contact with a hairy portion of his mother’s body, and this, arousing the idea of an animal, caused him to leap out of the bed