' At the present time in the east of Russia when a young
girl tries to find out by divination whom she will have as a
husband the traditional formula is 'Come and take my stockings
off.' Among the populations of the north and east, it is
sometimes the bride who must do this for her husband on the
wedding night, and sometimes the bridegroom for his wife, not as
a token of love, but as a nuptial ceremony. Among the
professional classes and small nobility in Russia parents place
money in the stocking of their child at marriage as a present for
the other partner, it being supposed that the couple mutually
remove each other's foot raiment, as an act of sexual possession,
the emblem of coitus." (Paul Jacoby, _Archives d'Anthropologie
Criminelle_, December, 1903, p. 793.) The practice among
ourselves of children hanging up their stockings at night for
presents would seem to be a relic of the last-mentioned custom.
While we may witness the sexual symbolism of the foot, with or without an
associated foot-fetichism, most highly developed in Asia and Eastern
Europe, it has by no means been altogether unknown in some stages of
western civilization, and traces of it may be found here and there even
yet.
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