ninety-seven minors (mostly females) accused of offences against public
decency, seventy-five simulated a modesty which, in his opinion, they were
entirely without.

III.

The Blush the Sanction of Modesty--The Phenomena of Blushing--Influences
Which Modify the Aptitude to Blush--Darkness, Concealment of the Face,
Etc.

It is impossible to contemplate this series of phenomena, so radically
persistent whatever its changes of form, and so constant throughout every
stage of civilization, without feeling that, although modesty cannot
properly be called an instinct, there must be some physiological basis to
support it. Undoubtedly such a basis is formed by that vasomotor mechanism
of which the most obvious outward sign is, in human beings, the blush. All
the allied emotional forms of fear--shame, bashfulness, timidity--are to
some extent upheld by this mechanism, but such is especially the case with
the emotion we are now concerned with.[64] The blush is the sanction of
modesty.

The blush is, indeed, only a part, almost, perhaps, an accidental
part, of the organic turmoil with which it is associated.
Partridge, who has studied the phenomena of blushing in one
hundred and twenty cases (_Pedagogical Seminary_, April, 1897),
finds that the following are the general symptoms: tremors near
the waist, weakness in the limbs, pressure, trembling, warmth,
weight or beating in the chest, warm wave from feet upward,
quivering of heart, stoppage and then rapid beating of heart,
coldness all over followed by heat, dizziness, tingling of toes
and fingers, numbness, something rising in throat, smarting of
eyes, singing in ears, prickling sensations of face, and pressure
inside head. Partridge considers that the disturbance is
primarily central, a change in the cerebral circulation, and that
the actual redness of the surface comes late in the nerve storm,
and is really but a small part of it.

There has been some discussion as to why, and indeed how far,
blushing is confined to the face. Henle (_Ueber das Erroethen_)
thought that we blush in the face because all nervous phenomena
produced by mental states appear first in the face, owing to the
anatomical arrangement of the nerves of the body. Darwin
(_Expression of the Emotions_) argued that attention to a part
tends to produce capillary activity in the part, and that the
face has be