the view that it is the girl’s puberty which constitutes the criterion of the man’s criminality in sexually approaching her.  In the temperate regions of Europe and North America the average age of the appearance of menstruation, the critical moment in the establishment of complete puberty, is fifteen (see, e.g., Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, Ch.  XI; the facts are set forth at length in Kisch’s Sexual Life of Woman, 1909).  Therefore it is reasonable that the act of an adult man in having sexual connection with a girl under sixteen, with or without her consent, should properly be a criminal act, severely punishable.  In those lands where the average age of puberty is higher or lower, the age of consent should be raised or lowered accordingly. (Bruno Meyer, arguing against any attempt to raise the age of consent above sixteen, considers that the proper age of consent is generally fourteen, for, as he rightly insists, the line of division is between the ripe and the unripe personality, and while the latter should be strictly preserved from the sphere of sexuality, only voluntary, not compulsory, influence should be brought to bear on the former. Sexual-Probleme, Ap., 1909.)

If we take into our view the wider considerations of psychology, morality, and law, we shall find ample justification for this point of view.  We have to remember that a girl, during all the years of ordinary school life, is always more advanced, both physically and psychically, than a boy of the same age, and we have to recognize that this precocity covers her sexual development; for even though it is true, on the average, that active sexual desire is not usually aroused in women until a somewhat later age, there is also truth in the observation of Mr. Thomas Hardy (New Review, June, 1894):  “It has never struck me that the spider is invariably male and the fly invariably female.”  Even, therefore, when sexual intercourse takes place between a girl and a youth somewhat older than herself, she is likely to be the more mature, the more self-possessed, and the more responsible of the two, and often the one who has taken the more active part in initiating the act. (This point has been discussed in “The Sexual Impulse in Women” in vol. iii of these Studies.) It must also be remembered that when a girl has once reached the age of puberty, and put on all the manner and habits as well as the physical development of a woman, it is no longer possible for a man always to estimate her age.  It is easy to see that a girl has not yet reached the age of puberty; it is impossible to tell whether a mature woman is under or over eighteen; it is therefore, to say the least, unjust to make her male partner’s fate for life depend on the recognition of a distinction which has no basis in nature.  Such considerations are, indeed, so obvious that there is no chance of carrying out thoroughly in practice the doctrine that a man should be imprisoned for life for having