Nakedness has, however, a hygienic value, as well as a spiritual significance, far beyond its influences in allaying the natural inquisitiveness of the young or acting as a preventative of morbid emotion. It is an inspiration to adults who have long outgrown any youthful curiosities. The vision of the essential and eternal human form, the nearest thing to us in all the world, with its vigor and its beauty and its grace, is one of the prime tonics of life. "The power of a woman's body," said James Hinton, "is no more bodily than the power of music is a power of atmospheric vibrations." It is more than all the beautiful and stimulating things of the world, than flowers or stars or the sea. History and legend and myth reveal to us the sacred and awful influence of nakedness, for, as Stanley Hall says, nakedness has always been "a talisman of wondrous power with gods and men." How sorely men crave for the spectacle of the human body--even to-day after generations have inculcated the notion that it is an indecorous and even disgusting spectacle--is witnessed by the eagerness with which they seek after the spectacle of even its imperfect and meretricious forms, although these certainly possess a heady and stimulating quality which can never be found in the pathetic simplicity of naked beauty. It was another spectacle when the queens of ancient Madagascar at the annual Fandroon, or feast of the bath, laid aside their royal robes and while their subjects crowded the palace courtyard, descended the marble steps to the bath in complete nakedness. When we make our conventions of clothing rigid we at once spread a feast for lust and deny ourselves one of the prime tonics of life. "I was feeling in despair and walking despondently along a Melbourne street," writes the Australian author of a yet unpublished autobiography, "when three children came running out of a lane and crossed the road in full daylight. The beauty and texture of their legs in the open air filled me with joy, so that I forgot all my troubles whilst looking at them. It was a bright revelation, an unexpected glimpse of Paradise, and I have never ceased to thank the happy combination of shape, pure blood, and fine skin of these poverty-stricken children, for the wind seemed to quicken their golden beauty, and I retained the rosy vision of their natural young limbs, so much more divine than those always under cover. Another occasion when naked young limbs made me forget all my gloom and despondency was on my first visit to Adelaide. I came on a naked boy leaning on the railing near the Baths, and the beauty of his face, torso, fair young limbs and exquisite feet filled me with joy and renewed hope. The tears came to my eyes, and I said to myself, 'While there is beauty in the world I will continue to struggle,'"