oking at her splashing about. He was deeply
distressed, thinking he must have done her harm, and destroyed
her modesty. The woman to whom this was said felt naturally
indignant, but also it gave her the feeling as if every man may
secretly despise a woman for the very things he teaches her, and
only meets her confiding delight with regret or dislike."
(Private communication.)

"Women will occasionally be found to hide diseases and symptoms
from a bashfulness and modesty so great and perverse as to be
hardly credible," writes Dr. W. Wynn Westcott, an experienced
coroner. "I have known several cases of female deaths, reported
as sudden, and of cause unknown, when the medical man called in
during the latter hours of life has been quite unaware that his
lady patient was dying of gangrene of a strangulated femoral
hernia, or was bleeding to death from the bowel, or from ruptured
varices of the vulva." (_British Medical Journal_, Feb. 29,
1908.)

The foregoing selection of facts might, of course, be
indefinitely enlarged, since I have not generally quoted from any
previous collection of facts bearing on the question of modesty.
Such collections may be found in Ploss and Max Bartels _Das
Weib_, a work that is constantly appearing in new and enlarged
editions; Herbert Spencer, _Descriptive Sociology_ (especially
under such headings as "Clothing," "Moral Sentiments," and
"AEsthetic Products"); W.G. Sumner, _Folkways_, Ch. XI;
Mantegazza, _Amori degli Uomini_, Chapter II; Westermarck,
_Marriage_, Chapter IX; Letourneau, _L'Evolution de la Morale_,
pp. 126 et seq.; G. Mortimer, _Chapters on Human Love_, Chapter
IV; and in the general anthropological works of Waitz-Gerland,
Peschel, Ratzel and others.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The earliest theory I have met with is that of St. Augustine, who
states (_De Civitate Dei_, Bk. XIV, Ch. XVII) that erections of the penis
never occurred until after the Fall of Man. It was the occurrence of this
"shameless novelty" which made nakedness indecent. This theory fails to
account for modesty in women.

[2] Guyau, _L'Irreligion de l'Avenir_, Ch. VII.

[3] Timidity, as understood by Dugas, in his interesting essay on that
subject, is probably most remote. Dr. H. Campbell's "morbid shyness"
(_British Medical Journal_, September 26, 1896) is, in part, identical
with timidity, in part,