Hutchinson (Archives of Surgery, vol. iv, p. 200) describes a case of amblyopia in a boy, developing after he had been placed to sleep in a servant-girl’s room.

Moll (Kontraere Sexualempfindung, third edition, 1899, p. 325) refers to the frequency with which servant-girls (between the ages of 18 and 30) carry on sexual practices with young boys (between 5 and 13) committed to their care.  More than a century earlier Tissot, in his famous work on onanism, referred to the frequency with which servant-girls corrupt boys by teaching them to masturbate; and still earlier, in England, the author of Onania gave many such cases.  We may, indeed, go back to the time of Rabelais, who (as Dr. Kiernan reminds me) represents the governesses of Gargantua, when he was a child, as taking pleasure in playing with his penis till it became wet, and joking with each other about it. (Gargantua, book i, chapter ix.)

The prevalence of such manifestations among servant-girls witnesses to their prevalence among lower-class girls generally.  In judging such acts, even when they seem to be very deliberate, it is important to remember that at this age unreasoning instinct plays a very large part in the manifestations of the sexual impulse.  This is clearly indicated by the phenomena observed in the insane.  Thus, as we have seen (page 214), Schroeter has found that, among girls of low social class under 20 years of age, spontaneous periodical sexual manifestations at menstrual epochs occurred in as large a proportion as 72 per cent.  Among girls of better social position these impulses are inhibited, or at all events modified, by good taste or good feeling, the influences of tradition or education; it is only to the latter that children should be intrusted.

Hoche mentions a case in which a man was accused of repeatedly exhibiting his sexual organs to the servant-girl at a house; she enjoyed the spectacle (Neurologisches Centralblatt, 1896, No. 2).  It may well be that in some cases of self-exhibition the offender has good reason, on the ground of previous experience, for thinking that he is giving pleasure.  “When we used to go to bathe while I was at school,” writes a correspondent, “girls from a poor quarter of the lower town (some quite 16) often followed us and stood to watch about a hundred yards from the river.  They used to ‘giggle’ and ‘pass remarks.’  I have seen girls of this class peeping through chinks of a palisade around a bathing-place on the Thames.”  A correspondent who has given special attention to the point tells me of the great interest displayed by young girls of the people in Italy in the sexual organs of men.

Curiosity—­whether in the form of the desire for knowledge or the desire for sensation—­is, of course, not confined to young girls and women of lower social strata, though in them it is less often restrained by