aside any question of phallic worship, a certain pride
and more or less private feeling of ostentation in the new
expansion and development of the organs of virility seems to be
almost normal at adolescence. "We have much reason to assume,"
Stanley Hall remarks, "that in a state of nature there is a
certain instinctive pride and ostentation that accompanies the
new local development. I think it will be found that
exhibitionists are usually those who have excessive growth here,
and that much that modern society stigmatizes as obscene is at
bottom more or less spontaneous and perhaps in some cases not
abnormal. Dr. Seerley tells me he has never examined a young man
largely developed who had the usual strong instinctive tendency
of modesty to cover himself with his hands, but he finds this
instinct general with those whose development is less than the
average." (G. Stanley Hall, _Adolescence_, vol. ii, p. 97.) This
instinct of ostentation, however, so far as it is normal, is held
in check by other considerations, and is not, in the strict
sense, exhibitionism. I have observed a full-grown telegraph boy
walking across Hampstead Heath with his sexual organs exposed,
but immediately he realized that he was seen he concealed them.
The solemnity of exhibitionism at this age finds expression in
the climax of the sonnet, "Oraison du Soir," written at 16 by
Rimbaud, whose verse generally is a splendid and insolent
manifestation of rank adolescence:--

"Doux comme le Seigneur du cedre et des hysopes,
Je pisse vers les cieux bruns tres haut et tres loin,
Avec l'assentiment des grands heliotropes."

(J.A. Rimbaud, _Oeuvres_, p. 68.)

In women, also, there would appear to be traceable a somewhat
similar ostentation, though in them it is complicated and largely
inhibited by modesty, and at the same time diffused over the body
owing to the absence of external sexual organs. "Primitive
woman," remarks Madame Renooz, "proud of her womanhood, for a
long time defended her nakedness which ancient art has always
represented. And in the actual life of the young girl to-day
there is a moment when by a secret atavism she feels the pride of
her sex, the intuition of her moral superiority, and cannot
understand why she must hide its cause. At this moment, wavering
between the