the Origin and Growth of Religion as Illustrated by Celtic Heathendom, p. 466.) It is interesting to compare the legend of Derbforgaill with a somewhat more modern Picardy folk-lore conte which is clearly analogous but no longer seems to show any mythologic element, “La Princesse qui pisse par dessus les Meules.”  This princess had a habit of urinating over hay-cocks; the king, her father, in order to break her of the habit, offered her in marriage to anyone who could make a hay-cock so high that she could not urinate over it.  The young men came, but the princess would merely laugh and at once achieve the task.  At last there came a young man who argued with himself that she would not be able to perform this feat after she had lost her virginity.  He therefore seduced her first and she then failed ignobly, merely wetting her stockings.  Accordingly, she became his bride. (Kryptadia, vol. i. p. 333.) Such legends, which have lost any mythologic elements they may originally have possessed and have become merely contes, are not uncommon in the folk-lore of many countries.  But in their earlier more religious forms and in their later more obscene forms, they alike bear witness to the large place which scatalogic conceptions play in the primitive mind.

It is a notable fact in evidence of the close and seemingly normal association with the sexual impulse of the scatalogic processes, that an interest in them, arising naturally and spontaneously, is one of the most frequent channels by which the sexual impulse first manifests itself in young boys and girls.

Stanley Hall, who has made special inquiries into the matter, remarks that in childhood the products of excretion by bladder and bowels are often objects of interest hardly less intense for a time than eating and drinking. ("Early Sense of Self,” American Journal of Psychology, April, 1898, p. 361.) “Micturitional obscenities,” the same writer observes again, “which our returns show to be so common before adolescence, culminate at 10 or 12, and seem to retreat into the background as sex phenomena appear.”  They are, he remarks, of two classes:  “Fouling persons or things, secretly from adults, but openly with each other,” and less often “ceremonial acts connected with the act or the product that almost suggest the scatalogical rites of savages, unfit for description here, but of great interest and importance.” (G.  Stanley Hall, Adolescence, vol. i, p. 116.) The nature of such scatalogical phenomena in childhood—­which are often clearly the instinctive manifestations of an erotic symbolism—­and their wide prevalence among both boys and girls, are very well illustrated in a narrative which I include in Appendix B, History II.

In boys as they approach the age of puberty, this attraction to the scatalogic, when it exists, tends to die out, giving place to more normal sexual conceptions, or at all events it takes a subordinate and less serious