s attention, his
responses, even his images become fixed by the stimuli of the city
streets.[134] To those interested in child welfare and human values this
is the supreme tragedy of the city.

2. Touch and the Primary Contacts of Intimacy

The study of the senses in their relations to personal and social
behavior had its origins in psychology, in psychoanalysis, in ethnology,
and in the study of races and nationalities with reference to the
conflict and fusion of cultures. Darwin's theory of the origin of the
species increased interest in the instincts and it was the study of the
instincts that led psychologists finally to define all forms of behavior
in terms of stimulus and response. A "contact" is simply a stimulation
that has significance for the understanding of group behavior.

In psychoanalysis, a rapidly growing literature is accessible to
sociologists upon the nature and the effects of the intimate contacts of
sex and family life. Indeed, the Freudian concept of the _libido_ may be
translated for sociological purposes into the desire for response. The
intensity of the sentiments of love and hate that cement and disrupt the
family is indicated in the analyses of the so-called "family romance."
Life histories reveal the natural tendencies toward reciprocal affection
of mother and son or father and daughter, and the mutual antagonism of
father and son or mother and daughter.

In ethnology, attention was early directed to the phenomena of taboo
with its injunction against contamination by contacts. The literature of
primitive communities is replete with the facts of avoidance of contact,
as between the sexes, between mother-in-law and son-in-law, with persons
"with the evil eye," etc. Frazer's volume on "Taboo and the Perils of
the Soul" in his series entitled _The Golden Bough_, and Crawley, in his
book, _The Mystic Rose_, to mention two outstanding examples, have
assembled, classified, and interpreted many types of taboo. In the
literature of taboo is found also the ritualistic distinction between
"the clean" and "the unclean" and the development of reverence and awe
toward "the sacred" and "the holy."

Recent studies of the conflict of races and nationalities, generally
considered as exclusively economic or political in nature, bring out the
significance of disgusts and fears based fundamentally upon
characteristic racial odors, marked variations in skin color and in
physiognomy as well as upon differenc