"All these various kinds of pleasure at length become associated
with the form of the mother's breast, which the infant embraces
with its hands, presses with its lips, and watches with its eyes;
and thus acquires more accurate ideas of the form of its mother's
bosom than of the odor, flavor, and warmth which it perceives by
its other senses. And hence at our maturer years, when any object
of vision is presented to us which by its wavy or spiral lines
bears any similitude to the form of the female bosom, whether it
be found in a landscape with soft gradations of raising and
descending surface, or in the forms of some antique vases, or in
other works of the pencil or the chisel, we feel a general glow
of delight which seems to influence all our senses; and if the
object be not too large we experience an attraction to embrace it
with our lips as we did in our early infancy the bosom of our
mothers." (E. Darwin, _Zooenomia_, 1800, vol. i, p. 174.)
The general admiration accorded to developed breasts and a developed
pelvis is evidenced by a practice which, as embodied in the corset, is all
but universal in many European countries, as well as the extra-European
countries inhabited by the white race, and in one form or another is by no
means unknown to peoples of other than the white race.
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