The average human being spends two weeks of their lives engaged in it at its most passionate, it burns 26 calories per minute; and, according to one eminent German scientist, one third of us don'ft do it the right way. That'fs kissing and, contrary to the lyrics of As Time Goes By in the film Casablanca, a kiss is not just a kiss. There'fs a lot more to it than that.



No one really knows how it all started. Oneless-than-romantic theory is that it was originally a preamble to the act of regurgitation. In the days before Heinz baby food, spoons and Moulinex blenders, cave mothers fed their young offspring by chewing morsels of food, liberally drenched with saliva, and poking the masticated mess into their mouths with their tongues.

Anthropologists pooh-pooh this theory saying that, if this was the case, mouth kissing would have gone on in all societies and eras, which it did not. In parts of Japan, Siberia and among the Eskimo culture, rubbing noses was, until modern times, the only kind of kissing that went on. Certain ancient Finnish tribes believed kissing to be distasteful and indecent, even though they happily bathed naked together. In Asia, for centuries, the bow was the traditional greeting and kissing would only go on in private. In Roman times, kissing was an act of homage used to denote status, ranked by the body parts someone was permitted to kiss. Important nobles kissed cheeks or hands while lesser mortals had to make do with feet kissing.

However, somehow, lip contact caught on and soon became more adventurous. According to Chinese Tao tradition, a perfect balance of yin and yang is only achieved with an exchange of "liquid jade" ? more prosaically-known as saliva. Or what we would call a French kiss.

"I have found men who didn't know how to kiss. I've always found time to teach them." - Mae West

Kissing, in the days before toothpaste and dental floss, must have been a grim affair. To make it more palatable, young maids would carry a clove-studded apple when courting, exchanging a bite for a kiss. The apple helped to clean the suitor'fs teeth and the cloves to sweeten his breath. Perhaps Clark Gable should have taken a leaf out of that particular history book when filming Gone With the Wind. Reportedly, his screen lover Vivien Leigh didn'ft want to kiss him because he had halitosis.

Kissing has not always been socially acceptable. In 16th century Naples, it was an offence that carried the death penalty. In Hartford, Connecticut, an old law still makes it illegal for a man to kiss his wife on a Sunday. And in Indiana there used to be a law preventing men with moustaches from kissing, presumably on the grounds of hygiene.

Countless poems, odes and books have been written on the subject of kissing. One of the lesser-known works is The Art of Kissing, written by Hugh Morris in 1936. The book analyses every aspect of the kiss and an entire chapter is devoted to How to Kiss Girls with Different Sizes of Mouth ? a useful manual for any man confronted with the voluminous, bee-stung lips of today'fs collagen-implanted females.

"A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous."- Ingrid Bergman

If kissing was slow to catch on in evolutionary terms, scientists concede that it has become part of "natural" human behaviour today. In trials they have found that, when seeing a woman he is attracted to, a man'fs saliva fills with the male hormone testosterone. Kissing passes some of those hormones on to the female, making her more in the mood for love.

According to another survey, people who kiss their partners goodbye when they leave for work in the morning tend to earn much higher salaries than those who don'ft.

And the scientist who said not all of us kiss the right way? He was Professor Onur Gunturkun from Germany'fs Ruhr University who discovered that two thirds of people tilt their heads to the right when kissing, which means that the other one third who tilt their heads to the left are not doing it the "right" way'c

Sta-kiss-stics

At the Minnesota Renaissance Festival in 1990, Alfred Wolfram from New Brighton, kissed 8001 people in 8 hours - over sixteen people a minute.

Between 1st and 6th May 1978 Americans Bobbi Sherlock and Ray Blazina held a kiss-in that lasted for 130 hours and 2 minutes.

In 1896, John C. Rice and May Irwin became the first couple to be recorded kissing in a film called The Kiss.

The longest kiss in film history was between Jane Wyman and RayTooney in the 1941 film, You're in the Army Now. The kiss lasted three-and-a-half minutes.

According to legend, any person who kisses the Blarney Stone at Cork'fs 15th century Blarney Castle will be endowed with the gift of eloquence and persuasive flattery.

Chile holds the world record for the largest number of people kissing, set in 2004 in the capital of Santiago when 4,400 kissing couples locked lips en masse.