[9] It must be remembered that the Medicean Venus is merely a comparatively recent and familiar embodiment of a natural attitude which is very ancient, and had impressed sculptors at a far earlier period. Reinach, indeed, believes ("La Sculpture en Europe," _L'Anthropologie_, No. 5, 1895) that the hand was first brought to the breast to press out the milk, and expresses the idea of exuberance, and that the attitude of the Venus of Medici as a symbol of modesty came later; he remarks that, as regards both hands, this attitude may be found in a figurine of Cyprus, 2,000 years before Christ. This is, no doubt, correct, and I may add that Babylonian figurines of Ishtar, the goddess of fertility, represent her as clasping her hands to her breasts or her womb. [10] When there is no sexual fear the impulse of modesty may be entirely inhibited. French ladies under the old Régime (as A. Franklin points out in his _Vie Privée d'Autrefois_) sometimes showed no modesty towards their valets, not admitting the possibility of any sexual advance, and a lady would, for example, stand up in her bath while a valet added hot water by pouring it between her separated feet. [11] I do not hereby mean to deny a certain degree of normal periodicity even to the human male; but such periodicity scarcely involves any element of sexual fear or attitude of sexual defence, in man because it is too slight to involve complete latency of the sexual functions, in other species because latency of sexual function in the male is always accompanied by corresponding latency in the female. [12] H. Northcote, _Christianity and the Sex Problem_, p. 8. Crawley had previously argued (_The Mystic Rose_, pp. 134, 180) that this same necessity for solitude during the performance of nutritive, sexual, and excretory functions, is a factor in investing such functions with a potential sacredness, so that the concealment of them became a religious duty. [13] _Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1878, p. 26. [14] _Essais_, livre ii, Ch. XV. [15] _Monsieur Nicolas_, vol. i, p. 89. [16] Lane, _Arabian Society_, p. 228. The Arab insistence on the value of virginal modesty is well brought out in one of the most charming stories of the _Arabian Nights_, "The History of the Mirror of Virginity." [17] This has especially been emphasized by Crawley, _The Mystic Rose_, pp. 181, 324 et seq., 353. [18] _Geschlecht und Gesellschaft_, Bd. II, Heft 8, p. 358.