its satisfaction.  “Flame” attraction is the beginning of such a morbid fetichism.  A sentiment which under other conditions would never have gone beyond ordinary friendship may thus become a “flame,” and even a “flame” of markedly sexual character.  Under these influences boys and girls feel the purest and simplest sentiments in a hyperesthetic manner.  The girls here studied have lost an exact conception of the simple manifestations of friendship, and think they are giving evidence of exquisite sensibility and true friendship by loving a companion to madness; friendship in them has become a passion.  That this intense desire to love a companion passionately is the result of the college environments may be seen by the following extract from a letter:  “You know, dear, much better than I do how acutely girls living away from their own homes, and far from all those who are dearest to them on earth, feel the need of loving and being loved.  You can understand how hard it is to be obliged to live without anyone to surround you with affection;” and the writer goes on to say how all her love turns to her correspondent.

While there is an unquestionable sexual element in the “flame” relationship, this cannot be regarded as an absolute expression of real congenital perversion of the sex-instinct.  The frequency of the phenomena, as well as the fact that, on leaving college to enter social life, the girl usually ceases to feel these emotions, are sufficient to show the absence of congenital abnormality.  The estimate of the frequency of “flames” in Normal schools, given to Obici and Marchesini by several lady collaborators, was about 60 per cent., but there is no reason to suppose that women teachers furnish a larger contingent of perverted individuals than other women.  The root is organic, but the manifestations are ideal and Platonic, in contrast with some other manifestations found in college-life.  No inquiry was made as to the details of solitary sexual manifestations in the colleges, the fact that they exist to more or less extent being sufficiently recognized.  The conversations already referred to are a measure of the excitations of sexuality existing in these college inmates and multiplied in energy by communication.  Such discourse was, wrote one collaborator, the order of the day, and it took place chiefly at the time when letter-writing also was easiest.  It may well be that sensual excitations, transformed into ethereal sentiments, serve to increase the intensity of the “flames.”

Taken altogether, Obici and Marchesini conclude, the flame may be regarded as a provisional synthesis.  We find here, in solution together, the physiological element of incipient sexuality, the psychical element of the tenderness natural to this age and sex, the element of occasion offered by the environment, and the social element with its nascent altruism.

II.

That the phenomena described in minute detail by Obici and Marchesini closely resemble the phenomena as they exist in English girls’ schools is indicated by the following communication, for which I am indebted to a lady who is familiar with an English girls’ college of very modern type:—­