says one doctor, "suddenly gave himself to the worst tendencies. It was found that the sense of touch was lost, and he felt nothing at all." Later, sensibility came back to the skin, and in the same moment the moral nature righted itself— like a ship that, having been wedged in a frozen sea, finds again the water rising and falling below it, and spreads its sails to the breeze.
"What of this?" some may cry. "The children of the people are not wedged in polar ice." Fair and delicate are the babes born even in the darkest slum; soft is the baby-skin as a rose-leaf, and sensitive as the young aspen. The question is, however, not whether the babe is born sensitive, but whether he is allowed to develop as a sensitive being. Dr. Leslie MacKenzie found that the sense of smell was not blunted in the children he tested. But it is possible, nay likely, that the dulling of smell takes place later. Matthew Arnold said that the upper class were a little like barbarians, the middle class wanting in idealism, and the people lacking in feeling. Where does this apparent want of feeling begin? It begins, of course, in the skin. "We all know," says Luys, a great brain specialist, "how fine, delicate, and sensitive is the skin of woman in general, and particularly of those who live in idleness and do no
