In the first place is modesty of religious origin? Every young girl feels vaguely that she has at her disposal a treasure which a number of people desire. This sentiment, which is confused with some obscure consciousness of sex, was necessary to enable the female to attain complete physical development before giving herself. Precocious immodesty must inevitably, in effect has, resulted in an arrested development. It might easily have produced also a comparative sterility. Modesty is thus a guarantee for the continuance of the species, one of the sentiments that natural selection must inevitably have tended to preserve and to increase. It is a condition, moreover, of sexual selection; if the female had been disposed to give herself indiscriminately, the species would have suffered. Happily desire is checked by modesty, an obstacle which it can remove only on condition of the woman’s being strongly attracted by the object desired; a quality which will subsequently be transmissible to the species. From the point of view of sexual selection there is in modesty a great deal of coquetry—a coquetry which is unaware of its aim, which is half unconscious, and often mistakes for a duty what is really but a bit of management. The art of provisional refusal, and of attractive flight, must inevitably have attained a high development among superior beings, for it is a powerful medium of seduction and selection. Modesty has developed side by side with it, and really constitutes but a fugitive moment in the eternity of female coquetry. Coquetry originates in the young girl who is yet too ignorant to be really modest, but too much of a woman not to love to attract and to retreat; and at the other extreme it constitutes the last remnant of modesty in women who really possess none. Finally, modesty is also composed largely of an element of fear, which has been very useful in the preservation of the race. Among animals the female almost always runs some risk in the presence of the male, which is generally stronger than she; love-making is not only a crisis but a danger, and she must mollify the male before surrendering herself to him, must seduce him before satisfying him. Even in the human race, in primitive times, women were not always safe from violence from men. Modesty secures a sort of expectant love which was necessary in primitive times, a proof, a period of mutual scrutiny. Lucretius has remarked that children, by their weakness and by their fragility, have contributed to the softening of human manners; the same remark applies to women and to this sense of their own comparative weakness, which they experience so acutely in modesty, and which they to some degree communicate to men. Women’s fears and scruples have made man’s hand less hard; their modesty has given rise in him to a certain form of respect, to a form of desire which is less brutal and more gentle; they have civilized love. Modesty is analogous to the species