“A long, long kiss, a kiss of youth and love, And beauty, all concentrating like rays Into one focus kindled from above; Such kisses as belong to early days, Where heart and soul and sense in concert move, And the blood’s lava, and the pulse a blaze, Each kiss a heart-quake--for a kiss’s strength, I think it must be reckoned by its length.” It is therefore a true saying, that a woman who permits a man to kiss her will ultimately grant him complete possession.[8] Moreover, by the majority of finely sensitive women the kiss is valued just as highly as the last favour.[9] The problem of the =origin= of the kiss, which Scheffel, in his book (“Trompeter von Säckingen”), has treated in humorous verse, has recently been investigated by the methods of natural science. The lip kiss is peculiar to man and in him the impulse to kiss is not innate, but has been gradually developed, and the kiss has only acquired by degrees a relation to the sexual sphere. Havelock Ellis has recently made an interesting investigation regarding the origin of the kiss, and has proved that the love kiss has developed from the primitive maternal kiss and from the sucking of the infant at the maternal breast,[10] which are customary in regions where the sexual kiss is unknown. Both the sense of touch and the sense of smell play a part in this primitive kiss, and to simple contact primitive man superadded both licking and biting. This primitive physiological sadism of the biting kiss was probably inherited from the lower animals, which when copulating often bite one another (Kleist in “Penthesilea” writes “Küsse”--kissing--rhymes with “Bisse”--biting). Earlier authors--as, for example, Mohnike, in his admirable essay on the sexual instinct--have inferred from the existence of these passionate accompaniments of the kiss that the latter has an intimate connexion with the nutritive impulse. We have indeed the familiar expression, “I could eat you for love.” Indeed, according to Mohnike, the frenzy of the wild kisses of passionate love may actually lead to anthropophagy, as in a case reported by Metzger, in which a young man on his wedding night actually bit and began to devour his wife. Although in this case we doubtless have to do with an insane individual, such sadistic feelings in a lesser degree are so often observed in association with kissing that they may be regarded as physiological.[11] In the novel “Hunger,” by Knut Hamsun, the author describes a peculiar relationship between hunger and the _libido sexualis_. Georg Lomer also, in the beginning of his thoughtful work, “Love and Psychosis” (Wiesbaden, 1907), expresses the opinion that hunger and love are not opposites, but that one is rather the completion, the larval state, or the sublimation, of the other. In certain species of spiders the male runs the danger, when performing his share in sexual congress, of being actually devoured by the stronger female.