stimulating quality which can never be found in the pathetic simplicity of naked beauty.  It was another spectacle when the queens of ancient Madagascar at the annual Fandroon, or feast of the bath, laid aside their royal robes and while their subjects crowded the palace courtyard, descended the marble steps to the bath in complete nakedness.  When we make our conventions of clothing rigid we at once spread a feast for lust and deny ourselves one of the prime tonics of life.

“I was feeling in despair and walking despondently along a Melbourne street,” writes the Australian author of a yet unpublished autobiography, “when three children came running out of a lane and crossed the road in full daylight.  The beauty and texture of their legs in the open air filled me with joy, so that I forgot all my troubles whilst looking at them.  It was a bright revelation, an unexpected glimpse of Paradise, and I have never ceased to thank the happy combination of shape, pure blood, and fine skin of these poverty-stricken children, for the wind seemed to quicken their golden beauty, and I retained the rosy vision of their natural young limbs, so much more divine than those always under cover.  Another occasion when naked young limbs made me forget all my gloom and despondency was on my first visit to Adelaide.  I came on a naked boy leaning on the railing near the Baths, and the beauty of his face, torso, fair young limbs and exquisite feet filled me with joy and renewed hope.  The tears came to my eyes, and I said to myself, ’While there is beauty in the world I will continue to struggle,’”

We must, as Boelsche declares (loc. cit.), accustom ourselves to gaze on the naked human body exactly as we gaze at a beautiful flower, not merely with the pity with which the doctor looks at the body, but with joy in its strength and health and beauty.  For a flower, as Boelsche truly adds, is not merely “naked body,” it is the most sacred region of the body, the sexual organs of the plant.

“For girls to dance naked,” said Hinton, “is the only truly pure form of dancing, and in due time it must therefore come about.  This is certain:  girls will dance naked and men will be pure enough to gaze on them.”  It has already been so in Greece, he elsewhere remarks, as it is to-day in Japan (as more recently described by Stratz).  It is nearly forty years since these prophetic words were written, but Hinton himself would probably have been surprised at the progress which has already been made slowly (for all true progress must be slow) towards this goal.  Even on the stage new and more natural traditions are beginning to prevail in Europe.  It is not many years since an English actress regarded as a calumny the statement that she appeared on the stage bare-foot, and brought an action for libel, winning substantial damages.  Such a result would scarcely be possible to-day.  The movement in which Isadora Duncan was a pioneer has led to a partial