This story can be traced to India. It found its way into several mediæval storybooks and attained great popularity. The monks made use of it in their sermons, and gave it an allegorical interpretation: Alexander was the good, trustful Christian; Aristotle was the conscience; the venomous girl, incontinence, which comprehends everything that is poisonous to the soul; and the criminal is the wicked man who pursues the lusts of the flesh and suffers his punishment. “Let us, therefore, abstain from all such things if we wish to reach Paradise,” is the moral that the monk draws from it at the close of his sermon. In conclusion I will quote several expressions to which kissing has given rise: A lady’s hat which was fashionable in England in 1850, and which had no brim to it, got the name of _Kiss-me-quick_. In contradistinction to this, the old-fashioned Danish hats with prominent brims were called _Kiss-me-if-you-can_. We have a modern variant in the Salvation lasses’ _Stop-kissing-me_ hat. In France, during the last century, there was a colour of the name of _Baise-moi ma mignonne_, called in England “heart’s-ease”: _Look-up-and-kiss-me_, _Kiss-me-at-the-garden-gate_, _Kiss-me-ere-I-rise_ or _Jump-up-and-kiss-me_. The verb “to kiss” is often used in a figurative sense, _e.g._, the Italians say of one who likes drinking, “He kisses the flask” (_Bacia il fiasco_); the Germans say of mean people, “They kiss the farthing” (_Den Pfennig küssen_); the English too speak of a _penny-kisser_. This figurative meaning is not, however, confined to jocose expressions and phrases; on the contrary, it occurs perhaps more frequently in serious prose. Our whole life, lived in love to our neighbour and nature, is nothing more than one long kiss. Kaalund somewhere says: A babe was I not long ere this, But time too swiftly slips; And that is why I press a kiss So warmly on life’s lips. W. F. H. A similar figurative use is extraordinarily common with the poets. H. C. Andersen, in _Goose-grass_, says of the lark that it flies past the tulip and other aristocratic flowers only to light on the sward by the humble goose-grass, which it kisses with its beak, and for which it sings its joyous song. The other poets represent the waves as kissing the white beach, the bees, the scented flowers; and the ears of corn in the fields as heaving beneath the warm kisses of the sun’s golden rays. The sun’s kisses are _oscula sancta_; every creature shares in them, for they are the most beautiful expression of God’s love. Ingemann sings in a morning hymn: The sun looks down on hut and hall, On haughty king and beggar weeping, Beholds the great ones and the small, And kisses babes in cradles sleeping. W. F. H. VIII THE ORIGIN OF KISSING Les coutumes, quelque étranges qu’elles deviennent parfois à la longue, ont généralement des commencements très simples. MAX MÜLLER.