they lost their virginity, in Dumas’s phrase, as they lost their milk-teeth, and could give no plausible account of the loss.  A girl of fifteen, mentioned by Commenge, living with her parents who supplied all her wants, lost her virginity by casually meeting a man who offered her two francs if she would go with him; she did so without demur and soon begun to accost men on her own account.  A girl of fourteen, also living comfortably with her parents, sacrificed her virginity at a fair in return for a glass of beer, and henceforth begun to associate with prostitutes.  Another girl of the same age, at a local fete, wishing to go round on the hobby horse, spontaneously offered herself to the man directing the machinery for the pleasure of a ride.  Yet another girl, of fifteen, at another fete, offered her virginity in return for the same momentary joy (Commenge, Prostitution Clandestine, 1897, pp. 101 et seq.).  In the United States, Dr. W. Travis Gibb, examining physician to the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, bears similar testimony to the fact that in a fairly large proportion of “rape” cases the child is the willing victim.  “It is horribly pathetic,” he says (Medical Record, April 20, 1907), “to learn how far a nickel or a quarter will go towards purchasing the virtue of these children.”

In estimating the tendency of prostitutes to display congenital physical anomalies, the crudest and most obvious test, though not a precise or satisfactory one, is the general impression produced by the face.  In France, when nearly 1000 prostitutes were divided into five groups from the point of view of their looks, only from seven to fourteen per cent, were found to belong to the first group, or that of those who could be said to possess youth and beauty (Jeannel, De la Prostitution Publique, 1860, p. 168).  Woods Hutchinson, again, judging from an extensive acquaintance with London, Paris, Vienna, New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, asserts that a handsome or even attractive-looking prostitute, is rare, and that the general average of beauty is lower than in any other class of women.  “Whatever other evils,” he remarks, “the fatal power of beauty may be responsible for, it has nothing to do with prostitution” (Woods Hutchinson, “The Economics of Prostitution,” American Gynaecological and Obstetric Journal, September, 1895).  It must, of course, be borne in mind that these estimates are liable to be vitiated through being based chiefly on the inspection of women who most obviously belong to the class of prostitutes and have already been coarsened by their profession.

If we may conclude—­and the fact is probably undisputed—­that beautiful, agreeable, and harmoniously formed faces are rare rather than common among prostitutes, we may certainly say that minute examination will reveal a large number of physical abnormalities.  One of the earliest important physical investigations