The sentiment of modesty is among the most changeable in form and degree. Its ethnical history is written in the volume which I have dedicated to the ethnology of love. It will suffice here to point out that I divide the nations into immodest, semi-modest and modest, according to the traces of modesty and the greater or less development of this sentiment. Modesty is unlike intelligence, or the sentiment of the beautiful, or other psychical phenomena, which show an ascending and regular progress as we gradually proceed from the lowest races to the highest; therefore, it cannot be considered alone as a dynamometer of progress. The Tehuelches of South America bathe very often, generally before dawn: but the men go into the water separately from the women; they are very modest people who never, in any case, take off their _chirípas_. And the Japanese, with a civilization a hundred times superior to that of the Tehuelches, are much inferior to them in the matter of modesty. The Malaysians are very modest, but the Greeks and the Romans were none too much so. Without leaving our own race and times, we have women who would die rather than subject themselves to an examination with the speculum, while men of great intelligence and lofty passions admit that they hardly feel a shadow of modesty. In the higher races, however, if we neglect a few exceptions and take human groups in great masses, we may say that modesty, like all psychical phenomena of a high order, grows, refines and presents more delicate forms proportionately to the growth of the moral and intellectual importance of a people. The nations which are the most advanced in civilization and morality are also the most modest. Modesty is one of the most elect forms of the seductions and the reticences of love; an extra-current of the great fundamental phenomena of generation; a physical self-respect; one of the psychical phenomena of the highest order. Faithful companion of love, it is a sentiment which in superior natures possesses infinite mysteries, ineffable delicacies, gestures deserving a virtue prize, glances which are a paradise, words and sighs which deserve to be immortalized by the pen of an artist. He who possesses the immodest or semi-modest nature of the Fuegian or the Japanese loses more than half of the treasures of love, and is like a man who, deprived of the olfactory sense, admires the flowers of a garden.