much the same relation to that between adults as the flower does to the fruit, and has about as little of physical sexuality in it as an apple-blossom has of the apple that develops from it.”  Moll also (op. cit. p. 76) considers that kissing and other similar superficial contacts, which he denominates the phenomena of contrectation, constitute most frequently the first and sole manifestation of the sexual impulse in childhood.

It is often stated that it is easier for children to preserve their sexual innocence in the country than in the town, and that only in cities is sexuality rampant and conspicuous.  This is by no means true, and in some respects it is the reverse of the truth.  Certainly, hard work, a natural and simple life, and a lack of alert intelligence often combine to keep the rural lad chaste in thought and act until the period of adolescence is completed.  Ammon, for instance, states, though without giving definite evidence, that this is common among the Baden conscripts.  Certainly, also, all the multiple sensory excitements of urban life tend to arouse the nervous and cerebral excitability of the young at a comparatively early age in the sexual as in other fields, and promote premature desires and curiosities.  But, on the other hand, urban life offers the young no gratification for their desires and curiosities.  The publicity of a city, the universal surveillance, the studied decorum of a population conscious that it is continually exposed to the gaze of strangers, combine to spread a veil over the esoteric side of life, which, even when at last it fails to conceal from the young the urban stimuli of that life, effectually conceals, for the most part, the gratifications of those stimuli.  In the country, however, these restraints do not exist in any corresponding degree; animals render the elemental facts of sexual life clear to all; there is less need or regard for decorum; speech is plainer; supervision is impossible, and the amplest opportunities for sexual intimacy are at hand.  If the city may perhaps be said to favor unchastity of thought in the young, the country may certainly be said to favor unchastity of act.

The elaborate investigations of the Committee of Lutheran pastors into sexual morality (Die Geschlechtich-sittliche Verhaeltnisse im Deutschen Reiche), published a few years ago, demonstrate amply the sexual freedom in rural Germany, and Moll, who is decidedly of opinion that the country enjoys no relative freedom from sexuality, states (op. cit., pp. 137-139, 239) that even the circulation of obscene books and pictures among school-children seems to be more frequent in small towns and the country than in large cities.  In Russia, where it might be thought that urban and rural conditions offered less contrast than in many countries, the same difference has been observed.  “I do not know,” a Russian correspondent writes, “whether Zola in La Terre correctly describes