series of cases (Medical Record, Oct. 29, 1910) Wolbarst obtained similar results, though he recognizes also the frequency of precocious sexuality in the young boys themselves.

Gibb states, concerning assaults on children by women:  “It is undeniably true that they occur much more frequently than is generally supposed, although but few of the cases are brought to public notice, owing to the difficulty of proving the charge.”  (W.T.  Gibb, article “Indecent Assaults upon Children,” in A. McLane Hamilton’s System of Legal Medicine, vol. i, p. 651.) Gibb’s opinion carries weight, since he is medical adviser for the New York Society for the Protection of Children, and compelled to sift the evidence carefully in such cases.

It should be mentioned that, while a sexual curiosity exercised on younger children is, in girls about the age of puberty, an ill-regulated, but scarcely morbid, manifestation, in older women it may be of pathological origin.  Thus, Kisch records the case of a refined and educated lady of 30 who had been married for nine years, but had never experienced sexual pleasure in coitus.  For a long time past, however, she had felt a strong desire to play with the genital organs of children of either sex, a proceeding which gave her sexual pleasure.  She sought to resist this impulse as much as possible, but during menstruation it was often irresistible.  Examination showed an enlarged and retroflexed uterus and anesthesia of vagina. (Kisch, Die Sterilitaet des Weibes, 1886, p. 103.) The psychological mechanism by which an anesthetic vagina leads to a feeling of repulsion for normal coitus and normal sexual organs, and directs the sexual feelings toward more infantile forms of sexuality, is here not difficult to trace.

It is not often that the sexual attempts of girls and young women on boys—­notwithstanding their undoubted frequency—­become of medico-legal interest.  In France in the course of ten years (1874 to 1884) only 181 women, who were mostly between 20 and 30 years of age, were actually convicted of sexual attempts on children below 15. (Paul Bernard, “Viols et attentats a la Pudeur,” Archives de l’Anthropologie Criminelle, 1887.) Lop ("Attentats a la Pudeur commis par des Femmes sur des Petits Enfants,” id., Aug., 1896) brings together a number of cases chiefly committed by girls between the ages of 18 and 20.  In England such accusations against a young woman or girl may easily be circumvented.  If she is under 16 she is protected by the Criminal Law Amendment Act and cannot be punished.  In any case, when found out, she can always easily bring the sympathy to her side by declaring that she is not the aggressor, but the victim.  Cases of violent sexual assault upon girls, Lawson Tait remarks, while they undoubtedly do occur, are very much rarer than the frequency with which the charge is made would lead us to suspect.  At one time, by