us emotion, or
creating it when absent. There is, perhaps, no exercise in
greater accordance with the sentiments or feelings of a barbarous
people, or more fully calculated to gratify their wild and
ungoverned passions." (W.C. Holden, _The Kaffir Race_, 1866, p.
274.)

Dancing, as the highest and most complex form of muscular movement, is the
most potent method of obtaining the organic excitement muscular movement
yields, and thus we understand how from the earliest zooelogical ages it
has been brought to the service of the sexual instinct as a mode of
attaining tumescence. Among savages this use of dancing works harmoniously
with the various other uses which dancing possesses in primitive times
and which cause it to occupy so large and vital a part in savage life that
it may possibly even affect the organism to such an extent as to mold the
bones; so that some authorities have associated platycnemia with dancing.
As civilization advances, the other uses of dancing fall away, but it
still remains a sexual stimulant. Burton, in his _Anatomy of Melancholy_,
brings forward a number of quotations from old authors showing that
dancing is an incitement to love.[41]

The Catholic theologians (Debreyne, _Moechialogie_, pp. 190-199)
for the most part condemn dancing with much severity. In
Protestant Germany, also, it is held that dance meetings and
musical gatherings are frequent occasions of unchastity. Thus in
the Leipzig district when a girl is asked "How did you fall?" she
nearly always replies "At the dance." (_Die
Geschlechtlich-Sittliche Verhaeltnisse im Deutschen Reiche_, vol.
i, p. 196.) It leads quite as often, and no doubt oftener, to
marriage. Rousseau defended it on this account (_Nouvelle
Heloise_, bk. iv, letter x); dancing is, he held, an admirable
preliminary to courtship, and the best way for young people to
reveal themselves to each other, in their grace and decorum,
their qualities and defects, while its publicity is its
safeguard. An International Congress of Dancing Masters was held
at Barcelona in 1907. In connection with this Congress, Giraudet,
president of the International Academy of Dancing Masters, issued
an inquiry to over 3000 teachers of dancing throughout the world
in order to ascertain the frequency with which dancing led to
marriage. Of over one million pupils of dancing, either married
or eng