they seem to have dropped out of use during the seventeenth century.  In a technical and very complete book, L’Art de la Lingerie, published in 1771, women’s drawers are not even mentioned, and Mercier (Tableau de Paris, 1783, vol. vii, p. 54) says that, except actresses, Parisian women do not wear drawers.  Even by ballet dancers and actresses on the stage, they were not invariably worn.  Camargo, the famous dancer, who first shortened the skirt in dancing, early in the eighteenth century, always observed great decorum, never showing the leg above the knee; when appealed to as to whether she wore drawers, she replied that she could not possibly appear without such a “precaution.”  But they were not necessarily worn by dancers, and in 1727 a young ballerina, having had her skirt accidentally torn away by a piece of stage machinery, the police issued an order that in future no actress or dancer should appear on the stage without drawers; this regulation does not appear, however, to have been long strictly maintained, though Schulz (Ueber Paris und die Pariser, p. 145) refers to it as in force in 1791.  (The obscure origin and history of feminine drawers have been discussed from time to time in the Intermediaire des Chercheurs et Curieux, especially vols. xxv, lii, and liii.)

Prof.  Irving Rosse, of Washington, refers to “New England prudishness,” and “the colossal modesty of some New York policemen, who in certain cases want to give written, rather than oral testimony.”  He adds:  “I have known this sentiment carried to such an extent in a Massachusetts small town, that a shop-keeper was obliged to drape a small, but innocent, statuette displayed in his window.” (Irving Rosse, Virginia Medical Monthly, October, 1892.) I am told that popular feeling in South Africa would not permit the exhibition of the nude in the Art Collections of Cape Town.  Even in Italy, nude statues are disfigured by the addition of tin fig-leaves, and sporadic manifestations of horror at the presence of nude statues, even when of most classic type, are liable to occur in all parts of Europe, including France and Germany. (Examples of this are recorded from time to time in Sexual-reform, published as an appendix to Geschlecht und Gesellschaft.)

Some years ago, (1898), it was stated that the Philadelphia Ladies’ Home Journal had decided to avoid, in future, all reference to ladies’ under-linen, because “the treatment of this subject in print calls for minutiae of detail which is extremely and pardonably offensive to refined and sensitive women.”

“A man, married twenty years, told me that he had never seen his wife entirely nude.  Such concealment of the external reproductive organs, by married people, appears to be common.  Judging from my own inquiry, very few women care to look upon male nakedness, and many women, though not wanting in esthetic feeling, find no beauty