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the longings of children is to be found in the fact that they occur mainly
in young women. We have, indeed, no tabulation of the ages of pregnant
women who have manifested longings, but Giles has clearly shown that these
chiefly occur in primiparae, and steadily and rapidly decrease in each
successive pregnancy. This fact, otherwise somewhat difficult of
explanation, is natural if we look upon the longings of pregnancy as a
revival of those of childhood. It certainly indicates also that we can by
no means regard these longings as exclusively the expression of a
physiological craving, for in that case they would be liable to occur in
any pregnancy unless, indeed, it is argued that with each successive
pregnancy the woman becomes less sensitive to her own physiological state.

There has been a frequent tendency, more especially among
primitive peoples, to regard a pregnant woman's longings as
something sacred and to be indulged, all the more, no doubt, as
they are usually of a simple and harmless character. In the Black
Forest, according to Ploss and Bartels, a pregnant woman may go
freely into other people's gardens and take fruit, provided she
eats it on the spot, and very similar privileges are accorded to
her elsewhere. Old English opinion, as reflected, for instance,
in Ben Jonson's plays (as Dr. Harriet C.B. Alexander has pointed
out), regards the pregnant woman as not responsible for her
longings, and Kiernan remarks ("Kleptomania and Collectivism,"
_Alienist and Neurologist_, November, 1902) that this is in "a
most natural and just view." In France at the Revolution a law of
the 28th Germinal, in the year III, to some extent admitted the
irresponsibility of the pregnant woman generally,--following the
classic precedent, by which a woman could not be brought before a
court of justice so long as she was pregnant,--but the Napoleonic
code, never tender to women, abrogated this. Pinard does not
consider that the longings of pregnant women are irresistible,
and, consequently, regards the pregnant woman as responsible.
This is probably the view most widely held. In any case these
longings seldom come up for medico-legal consideration.

The phenomena of the longings of pregnancy are linked to the much more
obscure and dubious phenomena of the influence of maternal impressions on
the child within the womb. It is true, indeed, that t