Page:The Kiss and its History.djvu/200

186 it is quite certain that its faculty of taste and smell were far more developed than ours.

And have we not still, especially in the love-kiss, but also in kisses between women, very numerous representatives of the primitive kiss, which I should like to term the "taste-kiss." I have many times pointed out, in the preceding pages, the part which taste plays in kissing; and I shall now add what I have often heard young girls say to a lady they had kissed amorously: "Your kisses taste so nice."

From being a natural expression for love the sucking, tasting kiss has, in course of time, become reduced to nothing more than a simple inspiratory movement of the lips, which, by analogy, has come to express many other feelings, such as gratitude, admiration, compassion, tenderness, etc. It has become at length so degraded as to be used as a purely conventional salutation.

If this reasoning be correct, then the mouth-kiss, in the course of its development, presents a perfect parallel with the nose-kiss. Both these forms of greeting were originally closely allied, but the mouth-kiss had better conditions for development than the nose-kiss. It has become a salutation of a considerably higher