Perhaps there are not many adults who realize the intense and secret absorption of thought in the minds of many boys and some girls concerning the problem of the physical conformation of the other sex, and the time, patience, and intellectual energy which they are willing to expend on the solution of this problem.  This is mostly effected in secret, but not seldom the secret impulse manifests itself with a sudden violence which in the blind eyes of the law is reckoned as crime.  A German lawyer, Dr. Werthauer, has lately stated that if there were a due degree of familiarity with the natural organs and functions of the opposite sex ninety per cent. of the indecent acts of youths with girl children would disappear, for in most cases these are not assaults but merely the innocent, though uncontrollable, outcome of a repressed natural curiosity.  It is quite true that not a few children boldly enlist each others’ cooeperation in the settlement of the question and resolve it to their mutual satisfaction.  But even this is not altogether satisfactory, for the end is not attained openly and wholesomely, with a due subordination of the specifically sexual, but with a consciousness of wrong-doing and an exclusive attentiveness to the merely physical fact which tend directly to develop sexual excitement.  When familiarity with the naked body of the other sex is gained openly and with no consciousness of indecorum, in the course of work and of play, in exercise or gymnastics, in running or in bathing, from a child’s earliest years, no unwholesome results accompany the knowledge of the essential facts of physical conformation thus naturally acquired.  The prurience and prudery which have poisoned sexual life in the past are alike rendered impossible.

Nakedness has, however, a hygienic value, as well as a spiritual significance, far beyond its influences in allaying the natural inquisitiveness of the young or acting as a preventative of morbid emotion.  It is an inspiration to adults who have long outgrown any youthful curiosities.  The vision of the essential and eternal human form, the nearest thing to us in all the world, with its vigor and its beauty and its grace, is one of the prime tonics of life.  “The power of a woman’s body,” said James Hinton, “is no more bodily than the power of music is a power of atmospheric vibrations.”  It is more than all the beautiful and stimulating things of the world, than flowers or stars or the sea.  History and legend and myth reveal to us the sacred and awful influence of nakedness, for, as Stanley Hall says, nakedness has always been “a talisman of wondrous power with gods and men.”  How sorely men crave for the spectacle of the human body—­even to-day after generations have inculcated the notion that it is an indecorous and even disgusting spectacle—­is witnessed by the eagerness with which they seek after the spectacle of even its imperfect and meretricious forms, although these certainly possess a heady and