There are thus a great number of constantly recurring occasions in savage life when continence must be preserved, and when, it is firmly believed, terrible risks would be incurred by its violation—­during war, after victory, after festivals, during mourning, on journeys, in hunting and fishing, in a vast number of agricultural and industrial occupations.

It might fairly be argued that the facility with which the savage places these checks on sexual intercourse itself bears witness to the weakness of the sexual impulse.  Evidence of another order which seems to point to the undeveloped state of the sexual impulse among savages may be found in the comparatively undeveloped condition of their sexual organs, a condition not, indeed, by any means constant, but very frequently noted.  As regards women, it has in many parts of the world been observed to be the rule, and the data which Ploss and Bartels have accumulated seem to me, on the whole, to point clearly in this direction.[190]

At another point, also, it may be remarked, the repulsion between the sexes and the restraints on intercourse may be associated with weak sexual impulse.  It is not improbable that a certain horror of the sexual organs may be a natural feeling which is extinguished in the intoxication of desire, yet still has a physiological basis which renders the sexual organs—­disguised and minimized by convention and by artistic representation—­more or less disgusting in the absence of erotic emotion.[191] And this is probably more marked in cases in which the sexual instinct is constitutionally feeble.  A lady who had no marked sexual desires, and who considered it well bred to be indifferent to such matters, on inspecting her sexual parts in a mirror for the first time in her life was shocked and disgusted at the sight.  Certainly many women could record a similar experience on being first approached by a man, although artistic conventions present the male form with greater truth than the female.  Moreover,—­and here is the significant point,—­this feeling is by no means restricted to the refined and cultured.  “When working at Michelangelo,” wrote a correspondent from Italy, “my upper gondolier used to see photographs and statuettes of all that man’s works.  Stopping one day before the Night and Dawn of S. Lorenzo, sprawling naked women, he exclaimed:  ‘How hideous they are!’ I pressed him to explain himself.  He went on:  ’The ugliest man naked is handsomer than the finest woman naked.  Women have crooked legs, and their sexual organs stink.  I only once saw a naked woman.  It was in a brothel, when I was 18.  The sight of her “natura” made me go out and vomit into the canal.  You know I have been twice married, but I never saw either of my wives without clothing.’  Of very rank cheese he said one day:  ‘Puzza come la natura d’una donna.’” This man, my correspondent added, was entirely normal and robust, but seemed to regard sexual congress as a mere evacuation, the sexual instinct apparently not being strong.