that can be carried up to his tongue, is promptly tasted and, if found agreeable, licked. Animals far below the mammals share this trait with the human infant. Especially among the mammals, including man, the trait is prominent: and it traces back to the infant's pleasure in sucking the maternal nipple. The lowest mammal, it may be remembered, which is the intermediate stage to the forms of life below the mammalian, has no breasts: the young lick the mother's entire body, which exudes milk at many places. Among mammals, the overpowering instinct to touch with the lips and tongue, that food may be found and life preserved, is specialized into the inner command to touch and suck the nipple for the same purpose. Out of this grows the trait among children of kissing and licking everything and everyone that they like, including people and pet animals.
On the mother's side, there is an impulse almost as strong to lick her young. The mother cat will commence licking her young almost at the moment of birth; other mammals share the trait. The world's leading scientists are inclined to find the immediate origin of the kiss as we know it in the kiss bestowed by the mother upon her child. Negative evidence is of value here. The maternal kiss is not universal throughout the human world; but it is much more widely distributed than the love kiss, as we know it. Furthermore, there is no locality in which the love kiss is found, where the maternal kiss is missing.
Freud, the psychoanalyst, has laid great em-
