The breasts of a strong, healthy woman who has attained complete sexual maturity are more or less firm in consistency, and considerable in size, exceeding now _Ovid’s_ demand concerning these organs, _ut sit quod capiat nostra tegatque manus_. The normal hemispherical form and the somewhat soft texture are subject to many variations, these being dependent upon race, climate, and sexual activity and also upon the kind of clothing worn. The nipple and its encircling areola are usually of a brownish colour; but in beautiful women they sometimes retain the pink colour characteristic of these structures in the virgin. In parous women who have suckled their children, the breasts are usually pendent, and often the left breast will be found to be somewhat larger than the other; generally also in such women the nipples are longer and thicker than normal. Not infrequently the nipples are withdrawn into a furrow of the skin, and become prominent only on local stimulation or as a result of sexual excitement. Sometimes in the region of the areola, especially in brunettes, we see a circle of small glands, which produce eminences beneath the skin. It is easy to understand that the breasts of such women in general no longer have the virginal form of small hemispheres, but have matured to a greater fulness and size. This, however, does not diminish their beauty, for the ideal of beauty must take into account the natural development of the body. Whereas at the present time, under the influence of the modern negation or at any rate undervaluation of maternity as the goal of woman’s life, it is the tendency of a certain school of art to misprize the influence of that state on the form of the breast, and to esteem the “flat bosom,” at an earlier day under the influence of _Rousseau’s Emile_, a book in which mothers are strongly urged to suckle their own children, the full bosom as a beauty was the fashion in art. Only a perverted taste can find a woman beautiful without bosom—without “that golden chalice, from which men quaff love, and children life” (_Mantegazza_),—an angular, flat being, without a rounded form. Nothing but a morbid desire for equality with man can induce woman herself to endeavor to conceal also the external manifestation of her sexual characteristics, and by her clothing to disguise, like a nun, the sexual curves of her figure.