activities and feelings before the period of puberty” (Freud, “Zur Sexuellen Aufklaerung der Kinder,” Soziale Medizin und Hygiene, Bd. ii, 1907; cf., for details, the same author’s Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie, 1905).  Moll, on the other hand, considers that Freud’s views on sexuality in infancy are exaggerations which must be decisively rejected, though he admits that it is difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate the feelings in childhood (Moll, Das Sexualleben des Kindes, p. 154).  Moll believes also that psycho-sexual manifestations appearing after the age of eight are not pathological; children who are weakly or of bad heredity are not seldom sexually precocious, but, on the other hand, Moll has known children of eight or nine with strongly developed sexual impulses, who yet become finely developed men.

Rudimentary sexual activities in childhood, accompanied by sexual feelings, must indeed—­when they are not too pronounced or too premature—­be regarded as coming within the normal sphere, though when they occur in children of bad heredity they are not without serious risks.  But in healthy children, after the age of seven or eight, they tend to produce no evil results, and are strictly of the nature of play.  Play, both in animals and men, as Groos has shown with marvelous wealth of illustration, is a beneficent process of education; the young creature is thereby preparing itself for the exercise of those functions which in later life it must carry out more completely and more seriously.  In his Spiele der Menschen, Groos applies this idea to the sexual play of children, and brings forward quotations from literature in evidence.  Keller, in his “Romeo und Juliet auf dem Dorfe,” has given an admirably truthful picture of these childish love-relationships.  Emil Schultze-Malkowsky (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Bd. ii, p. 370) reproduces some scenes from the life of a little girl of seven clearly illustrating the exact nature of the sexual manifestation at this age.

A kind of rudimentary sexual intercourse between children, as Bloch has remarked (Beitraege, etc., Bd. ii, p. 254), occurs in many parts of the world, and is recognized by their elders as play.  This is, for instance, the case among the Bawenda of the Transvaal (Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1896, Heft 4, p. 364), and among the Papuans of Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land, with the approval of the parents, although much reticence is observed (id., 1889, Heft 1, p. 16).  Godard (Egypte et Palestine, 1867, p. 105) noted the sexual play of the boys and girls in Cairo.  In New Mexico W.A.  Hammond (Sexual Impotence, p. 107) has seen boys and girls attempting a playful sexual conjunction with the encouragement of men and women, and in New York he has seen boys and girls of three and four doing the same in the presence of their parents, with only a laughing rebuke.  “Playing at pa and ma” is indeed extremely