sitive and unmannerly European's eye at once
causes her to feel confusion. Stratz, a physician, and one, moreover, who
had long lived among the Javanese who frequently go naked, found that
naked Japanese women felt no embarrassment in his presence.

It is doubtless as a cloak to the blush that we must explain the curious
influence of darkness in restraining the manifestations of modesty, as
many lovers have discovered, and as we may notice in our cities after
dark. This influence of darkness in inhibiting modesty is a very ancient
observation. Burton, in the _Anatomy of Melancholy_, quotes from Dandinus
the saying "_Nox facit impudentes_," directly associating this with
blushing, and Bargagli, the Siennese novelist, wrote in the sixteenth
century that, "it is commonly said of women, that they will do in the dark
what they would not do in the light." It is true that the immodesty of a
large city at night is to some extent explained by the irruption of
prostitutes at that time; prostitutes, being habitually nearer to the
threshold of immodesty, are more markedly affected by this influence. But
it is an influence to which the most modest women are, at all events in
some degree, susceptible. It has, indeed, been said that a woman is always
more her real self in the dark than in the glare of daylight; this is part
of what Chamberlain calls her night-inspiration.

"Traces of the night-inspiration, of the influence of the
primitive fire-group, abound in woman. Indeed, it may be said
(the life of Southern Europe and of American society of to-day
illustrates this point abundantly) that she is, in a sense, a
night-being, for the activity, physical and moral, of modern
women (revealed e.g. in the dance and the nocturnal
intellectualities of society) in this direction is remarkable.
Perhaps we may style a good deal of her ordinary day-labor as
rest, or the commonplaces and banalities of her existence, her
evening and night life being the true side of her activities"
(A.F. Chamberlain, "Work and Rest," _Popular Science Monthly_,
March, 1902). Giessler, who has studied the general influence of
darkness on human psychic life, reaches conclusions which
harmonize with these (C.M. Giessler, "Der Einfluss der Dunkelheit
auf das Seelenleben des Menschen," _Vierteljahrsschrift fuer
wissenschaftliche Philosophie_, 1904, pp. 255-279). I have not
been able to see Giessler's p