There is a very prevalent impression that the senses of savages are more delicate than ours. In one way they are. A savage can often see an object at a greater distance, and hear a fainter sound, than a white man. But in what may be called æsthetic as distinguished from physical refinement, savages are vastly our inferiors. A savage can hardly tell the difference between two adjacent notes in the musical scale, while a musician can distinguish the sixtieth part of a semitone. And why would the wondrous harmonies of a Chopin nocturne seem a mere chaos of sound to a savage? Because his ears have not been trained through his imagination and intellect to discriminate sounds and sound-combinations, or to follow the plot or development of a musical narrative or “theme.” Just so with the sense of touch. A sweetheart’s veil fluttering in a Hottentot’s face would only annoy him. A squeeze of the hand would leave him cold; and would he refrain from putting his arm round her waist if that gave him any pleasure? Obviously, then, the reason why the art of kissing is unknown to him is because his senses are too callous, his imagination too sluggish. Kissing, like every other fine art, has its sensuous and its imaginative or intellectual side. Of all parts of the visible body the lips are the most sensitive to contact. Here the layer in which the nerves and blood-vessels are contained is not covered over, as elsewhere on the skin, by a thick leathery epidermis, but only thinly veiled by a transparent epithelium; so that when lips are applied to lips, the blood-vessels which carry the vital fluid straight from the two loving hearts, and the soul-fibres, called nerves, are brought into almost immediate contact: whence that interchange of soul-magnetism—that electric shock which makes the first mutual kiss of Love the sweetest moment of life— “What words can ever speak affection So thrilling and sincere as thine?”—BURNS. Yet herein the imagination plays a much more prominent _rôle_ than it appears to do at first sight. The real reason why a savage cannot enjoy a kiss is not so much because his lips are deficient in tactile sensibility, as because he has no imagination to invest labial contact with the romance of individualised passion. If a lover’s pleasure lay in the mere labial contact, he would as soon exchange a kiss with any other girl. But should a sweetheart, on being asked for a kiss, refer him, say, to his sister or her sister; though the latter be a hundred times more beautiful, he would chide his love for offering a stone where bread was wanted. His imagination has so long painted to him the superior ecstasy of a kiss from her that, when he finally gets it, the long-deferred gratification ensures the unparalleled rapture anticipated. ANCIENT KISSES