In Iceland, according to Max Bartels ("Islaendischer Brauch und Volksglaube,” etc., Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 1900, Heft 2 and 3) we find a transition between the natural and the fanciful in the stories told to children of the origin of babies (the stork is here precluded, for it only extends to the southern border of Scandinavian lands).  In North Iceland it is said that God made the baby and the mother bore it, and on that account is now ill.  In the northwest it is said that God made the baby and gave it to the mother.  Elsewhere it is said that God sent the baby and the midwife brought it, the mother only being in bed to be near the baby (which is seldom placed in a cradle).  It is also sometimes said that a lamb or a bird brought the baby.  Again it is said to have entered during the night through the window.  Sometimes, however, the child is told that the baby came out of the mother’s breasts, or from below her breasts, and that is why she is not well.

Even when children learn that babies come out of the mother’s body this knowledge often remains very vague and inaccurate.  It very commonly happens, for instance, in all civilized countries that the navel is regarded as the baby’s point of exit from the body.  This is a natural conclusion, since the navel is seemingly a channel into the body, and a channel for which there is no obvious use, while the pudendal cleft would not suggest itself to girls (and still less to boys) as the gate of birth, since it already appears to be monopolized by the urinary excretion.  This belief concerning the navel is sometimes preserved through the whole period of adolescence, especially in girls of the so-called educated class, who are too well-bred to discuss the matter with their married friends, and believe indeed that they are already sufficiently well informed.  At this age the belief may not be altogether harmless, in so far as it leads to the real gate of sex being left unguarded.  In Elsass where girls commonly believe, and are taught, that babies come through the navel, popular folk-tales are current (Anthropophyteia, vol. iii, p. 89) which represent the mistakes resulting from this belief as leading to the loss of virginity.

Freud, who believes that children give little credit to the stork fable and similar stories invented for their mystification, has made an interesting psychological investigation into the real theories which children themselves, as the result of observation and thought, reach concerning the sexual facts of life (S.  Freud, “Ueber Infantile Sexualtheorien,” Sexual-Probleme, Dec., 1908).  Such theories, he remarks, correspond to the brilliant, but defective hypotheses which primitive peoples arrive at concerning the nature and origin of the world.  There are three theories, which, as Freud quite truly concludes, are very