common among children in genuine innocence, and with a complete absence of viciousness; and is by no means confined to children of low social class.  Moll remarks on its frequency (Libido Sexualis, Bd. i, p. 277), and the committee of evangelical pastors, in their investigation of German rural morality (Die Geschlechtliche-sittliche Verhaeltnisse, Bd. i, p. 102) found that children who are not yet of school age make attempts at coitus.  The sexual play of children is by no means confined to father and mother games; frequently there are games of school with the climax in exposure and smackings, and occasionally there are games of being doctors and making examinations.  Thus a young English woman says:  “Of course, when we were at school [at the age of twelve and earlier] we used to play with one another, several of us girls; we used to go into a field and pretend we were doctors and had to examine one another, and then we used to pull up one another’s clothes and feel each other.”

These games do not necessarily involve the cooeperation of the sexual impulse, and still less have they any element of love.  But emotions of love, scarcely if at all distinguishable from adult sexual love, frequently appear at equally early ages.  They are of the nature of play, in so far as play is a preparation for the activities of later life, though, unlike the games, they are not felt as play.  Ramdohr, more than a century ago (Venus Urania, 1798), referred to the frequent love of little boys for women.  More usually the love is felt towards individuals of the opposite or the same sex who are not widely different in age, though usually older.  The most comprehensive study of the matter has been made by Sanford Bell in America on a basis of as many as 2,300 cases (S.  Bell, “A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love Between the Sexes,” American Journal Psychology, July, 1902).  Bell finds that the presence of the emotion between three and eight years of age is shown by such actions as hugging, kissing, lifting each other, scuffling, sitting close to each other, confessions to each other and to others, talking about each other when apart, seeking each other and excluding the rest, grief at separation, giving gifts, showing special courtesies to each other, making sacrifices for each other, exhibiting jealousy.  The girls are, on the whole, more aggressive than the boys, and less anxious to keep the matter secret.  After the age of eight, the girls increase in modesty and the boys become still more secretive.  The physical sensations are not usually located in the sexual organs; erection of the penis and hyperaemia of the female sexual parts Bell regards as marking undue precocity.  But there is diffused vascular and nervous tumescence and a state of exaltation comparable, though not equal, to that experienced in adolescent and adult age.  On the whole, as Bell soundly concludes, “love between children of opposite sex bears