There is undoubtedly truth in this statement, though it must be remembered that, excellent as chastity is, if it is based on mere ignorance, its possessor is exposed to terrible dangers.

The question of sexual hygiene, more especially in its special aspect of sexual enlightenment, is not, however, dependent on the fact that in some children the psychic and nervous manifestation of sex appears at an earlier age than in others.  It rests upon the larger general fact that in all children the activity of intelligence begins to work at a very early age, and that this activity tends to manifest itself in an inquisitive desire to know many elementary facts of life which are really dependent on sex.  The primary and most universal of these desires is the desire to know where children come from.  No question could be more natural; the question of origins is necessarily a fundamental one in childish philosophies as, in more ultimate shapes, it is in adult philosophies.  Most children, either guided by the statements, usually the misstatements, of their elders, or by their own intelligence working amid such indications as are open to them, are in possession of a theory of the origin of babies.

Stanley Hall ("Contents of Children’s Minds on Entering School,” Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1891) has collected some of the beliefs of young children as to the origin of babies.  “God makes babies in heaven, though the Holy Mother and even Santa Claus make some.  He lets them down and drops them, and the women or doctors catch them, or He leaves them on the sidewalk, or brings them down a wooden ladder backwards and pulls it up again, or mamma or the doctor or the nurse go up and fetch them, sometimes in a balloon, or they fly down and lose off their wings in some place or other and forget it, and jump down to Jesus, who gives them around.  They were also often said to be found in flour-barrels, and the flour sticks ever so long, you know, or they grew in cabbages, or God puts them in water, perhaps in the sewer, and the doctor gets them out and takes them to sick folks that want them, or the milkman brings them early in the morning; they are dug out of the ground, or bought at the baby store.”

In England and America the inquisitive child is often told that the baby was found in the garden, under a gooseberry bush or elsewhere; or more commonly it is said, with what is doubtless felt to be a nearer approach to the truth, that the doctor brought it.  In Germany the common story told to children is that the stork brings the baby.  Various theories, mostly based on folk-lore, have been put forward to explain this story, but none of them seem quite convincing (see, e.g., G. Herman, “Sexual-Mythen,” Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, vol. i, Heft 5, 1906, p. 176, and P. Naecke, Neurologische Centralblatt, No. 17, 1907).  Naecke thinks there is some plausibility in Professor Petermann’s suggestion