exquisite and intense sensations of touch.

"We believe nothing is so exciting to the instinct or mere
passions as the presence of the hand or those tactile caresses
which mark affection," states the anonymous author of an article
on "Woman in her Psychological Relations," in the _Journal of
Psychological Medicine_, 1851. "They are the most general stimuli
in lower animals. The first recourse in difficulty or danger, and
the primary solace in anguish, for woman is the bosom of her
husband or her lover. She seeks solace and protection and repose
on that part of the body where she herself places the objects of
her own affection. Woman appears to have the same instinctive
impulse in this respect all over the world."

It is because the sexual orgasm is founded on a special adaptation and
intensification of touch sensations that the sense of touch generally is
to be regarded as occupying the very first place in reference to the
sexual emotions. Féré, Mantegazza, Penta, and most other writers on this
question are here agreed. Touch sensations constitute a vast gamut for the
expression of affection, with at one end the note of minimum personal
affection in the brief and limited touch involved by the conventional
hand-shake and the conventional kiss, and at the other end the final and
intimate contact in which passion finds the supreme satisfaction of its
most profound desire. The intermediate region has its great significance
for us because it offers a field in which affection has its full scope,
but in which every road may possibly lead to the goal of sexual love. It
is the intimacy of touch contacts, their inevitable approach to the
threshold of sexual emotion, which leads to a jealous and instinctive
parsimony in the contact of skin and skin and to the tendency with the
increased sensitiveness of the nervous system involved by civilization to