Curious, too, are the intensifications of foot-consciousness throughout the early years of childhood, whenever children have the exceptional privilege of going barefoot, or have new shoes. The feet are often apostrophized, punished, beaten sometimes to the point of pain for breaking things, throwing the child down, etc. Several children have habits, which reach great intensity, and then vanish, of touching or tickling the feet, with gales of laughter, and a few are described as showing an almost morbid reluctance to wear anything upon the feet, or even to having them touched by others.... Several almost fall in love with the great toe or the little one, especially admiring some crease or dimple in it, dressing it in some rag of silk or bit of ribbon, or cut-off glove fingers, winding it with string, prolonging it by tying on bits of wood. Stroking the feet of others, especially if they are shapely, often becomes almost a passion with young children, and several adults confess a survival of the same impulse which it is an exquisite pleasure to gratify. The interest of some mothers in babies' toes, the expressions of which are ecstatic and almost incredible, is a factor of great importance." (G. Stanley Hall, "Some Aspects of the Early Sense of Self," _American Journal of Psychology_, April, 1898.) In childhood, Stanley Hall remarks elsewhere (_Adolescence_, vol. ii, p. 104), "a form of courtship may consist solely in touching feet under the desk." It would seem that even animals have a certain amount of sexual consciousness in the feet; I have noticed a male donkey, just before coitus, bite the feet of his partner. At the same time it is scarcely usual for the normal lover, in most civilized countries to-day, to attach primary importance to the foot, such as he very frequently attaches to the eyes, though the feet play a very conspicuous part in the work of certain novelists.[15] In a small but not inconsiderable minority of persons, however, the foot or the boot becomes the most attractive part of a woman, and in some morbid cases the woman herself is regarded as a comparatively unimportant appendage to her feet or her boots. The boots under civilized conditions much more frequently constitute the sexual symbol than do the feet themselves; this is not surprising since in ordinary life the feet are not often seen.