her's bosom, its sense of perceiving warmth is
first agreeably affected; next its sense of smell is delighted
with the odor of her milk; then its taste is gratified by the
flavor of it; afterward the appetites of hunger and of thirst
afford pleasure by the possession of their object, and by the
subsequent digestion of the aliment; and, last, the sense of
touch is delighted by the softness and smoothness of the milky
fountain, the source of such variety of happiness.

"All these various kinds of pleasure at length become associated
with the form of the mother's breast, which the infant embraces
with its hands, presses with its lips, and watches with its eyes;
and thus acquires more accurate ideas of the form of its mother's
bosom than of the odor, flavor, and warmth which it perceives by
its other senses. And hence at our maturer years, when any object
of vision is presented to us which by its wavy or spiral lines
bears any similitude to the form of the female bosom, whether it
be found in a landscape with soft gradations of raising and
descending surface, or in the forms of some antique vases, or in
other works of the pencil or the chisel, we feel a general glow
of delight which seems to influence all our senses; and if the
object be not too large we experience an attraction to embrace it
with our lips as we did in our early infancy the bosom of our
mothers." (E. Darwin, _Zooenomia_, 1800, vol. i, p. 174.)

The general admiration accorded to developed breasts and a developed
pelvis is evidenced by a practice which, as embodied in the corset, is all
but universal in many European countries, as well as the extra-European
countries inhabited by the white race, and in one form or another is by no
means unknown to peoples of other than the white race.

The tightening of the waist girth was little known to the Greeks of the
best period, but it was practiced by the Greeks of the decadence and by
them transmitted to the Romans; there are many references in Latin
literature to this practice, and the ancient physician wrote against it in
the same sense as modern doctors. So far as Christian Europe is concerned
it would appear that the corset arose to gratify an ideal of asceticism
rather than of sexual allurement. The bodice in early mediaeval days bound
and compressed the breasts and thus tended to efface the specifically
feminine character