While, therefore, it is possibly, even probably, true that the soundest and healthiest individuals show no definite signs of nervous and psychic sexuality in childhood, such manifestations are still sufficiently frequent to make it impossible to say that sexual hygiene may be completely ignored until puberty is approaching.

Precocious physical development occurs as a somewhat rare variation.  W. Roger Williams ("Precocious Sexual Development with Abstracts of over One Hundred Cases,” British Gynaecological Journal, May, 1902) has furnished an important contribution to the knowledge of this anomaly which is much commoner in girls than in boys.  Roger Williams’s cases include only twenty boys to eighty girls, and precocity is not only more frequent but more pronounced in girls, who have been known to conceive at eight, while thirteen is stated to be the earliest age at which boys have proved able to beget children.  This, it may be remarked, is also the earliest age at which spermatozoa are found in the seminal fluid of boys; before that age the ejaculations contain no spermatozoa, and, as Fuerbringer and Moll have found, they may even be absent at sixteen, or later.  In female children precocious sexual development is less commonly associated with general increase of bodily development than in boys. (An individual case of early sexual development in a girl of five has been completely described and figured in the Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1896, Heft 4, p. 262.)

Precocious sexual impulses are generally vague, occasional, and more or less innocent.  A case of rare and pronounced character, in which a child, a boy, from the age of two had been sexually attracted to girls and women, and directed all his thoughts and actions to sexual attempts on them, has been described by Herbert Rich, of Detroit (Alienist and Neurologist, Nov., 1905).  General evidence from the literature of the subject as to sexual precocity, its frequency and significance, has been brought together by L.M.  Terman ("A Study in Precocity,” American Journal Psychology, April, 1905).

The erections that are liable to occur in male infants have usually no sexual significance, though, as Moll remarks, they may acquire it by attracting the child’s attention; they are merely reflex.  It is believed by some, however, and notably by Freud, that certain manifestations of infant activity, especially thumb-sucking, are of sexual causation, and that the sexual impulse constantly manifests itself at a very early age.  The belief that the sexual instinct is absent in childhood, Freud regards as a serious error, so easy to correct by observation that he wonders how it can have arisen.  “In reality,” he remarks, “the new-born infant brings sexuality with it into the world, sexual sensations accompany it through the days of lactation and childhood, and very few children can fail to experience sexual