especially in more remote parts of the country, as late as the seventeenth century.  Where-ever primitive races abandon nakedness for clothing, at once the tendency to disease, mortality, and degeneracy notably increases, though it must be remembered that the use of clothing is commonly accompanied by the introduction of other bad habits.  “Nakedness is the only condition universal among vigorous and healthy savages; at every other point perhaps they differ,” remarks Frederick Boyle in a paper ("Savages and Clothes,” Monthly Review, Sept., 1905) in which he brings together much evidence concerning the hygienic advantages of the natural human state in which man is “all face.”

It is in Germany that a return towards nakedness has been most ably and thoroughly advocated, notably by Dr. H. Pudor in his Nackt-Cultur, and by R. Ungewitter in Die Nacktheit (first published in 1905), a book which has had a very large circulation in many editions.  These writers enthusiastically advocate nakedness, not only on hygienic, but on moral and artistic grounds.  Pudor insists more especially that “nakedness, both in gymnastics and in sport, is a method of cure and a method of regeneration;” he advocates co-education in this culture of nakedness.  Although he makes large claims for nakedness—­believing that all the nations which have disregarded these claims have rapidly become decadent—­Pudor is less hopeful than Ungewitter of any speedy victory over the prejudices opposed to the culture of nakedness.  He considers that the immediate task is education, and that a practical commencement may best be made with the foot which is specially in need of hygiene and exercise; a large part of the first volume of his book is devoted to the foot.

As the matter is to-day viewed by those educationalists who are equally alive to sanitary and sexual considerations, the claims of nakedness, so far as concerns the young, are regarded as part alike of physical and moral hygiene.  The free contact of the naked body with air and water and light makes for the health of the body; familiarity with the sight of the body abolishes petty pruriencies, trains the sense of beauty, and makes for the health of the soul.  This double aspect of the matter has undoubtedly weighed greatly with those teachers who now approve of customs which, a few years ago, would have been hastily dismissed as “indecent.”  There is still a wide difference of opinion as to the limits to which the practice of nakedness may be carried, and also as to the age when it should begin to be restricted.  The fact that the adult generation of to-day grew up under the influence of the old horror of nakedness is an inevitable check on any revolutionary changes in these matters.