of good family—­the impulse to cut off girls’ braids appeared after recovery from a severe fever.  He would gaze admiringly at the long tresses and then clip them off with great rapidity; he did this in some fifty cases before he was caught and imprisoned.  He usually threw the braids away before he reached home. (Alienist and Neurologist, April, 1889, p. 325.) In this case there is no history of sexual excitement, probably because no proper medico-legal examination was made. (It may be added that hair-despoilers have been specially studied by Motet, “Les Coupeurs de Nattes,” Annales d’Hygiene, 1890.)

The stuff-fetiches are most usually fur and velvet; feathers, silk, and leathers also sometimes exert this influence; they are all, it will be noted, animal substances.[38] The most interesting is probably fur, the attraction of which is not uncommon in association with passive algolagnia.  As Stanley Hall has shown, the fear of fur, as well as the love of it, is by no means uncommon in childhood; it may appear even in infancy and in children who have never come in contact with animals.[39] It is noteworthy that in most cases of uncomplicated stuff-fetichism the attraction apparently arises on a congenital basis, as it appears in persons of nervous or sensitive temperament at an early age and without being attached to any definite causative incident.  The sexual excitation is nearly always produced by the touch rather than by the sight.  As we found, when dealing with the sense of touch in the previous volume, the specific sexual sensations may be regarded as a special modification of ticklishness.  The erotic symbolism in the case of these stuff-fetichisms would seem to be a more or less congenital perversion of ticklishness in relation to specific animal contacts.

A further degree of perversion in this direction is reached in a case of erotic zoophilia, recorded by Krafft-Ebing.[40] In this case a congenital neuropath, of good intelligence but delicate and anaemic, with feeble sexual powers, had a great love of domestic animals, especially dogs and cats, from an early age; when petting them he experienced sexual emotions, although he was innocent in sexual matters.  At puberty he realized the nature of his feelings and tried to break himself of his habits.  He succeeded, but then began erotic dreams accompanied by images of animals, and these led to masturbation associated with ideas of a similar kind.  At the same time he had no wish for any sort of sexual intercourse with animals, and was indifferent as to the sex of the animals which attracted him; his sexual ideals were normal.  Such a case seems to be fundamentally one of fetichism on a tactile basis, and thus forms a transition between the stuff-fetichisms and the complete perversions of sexual attraction toward animals.