out of sight and to garble others, has perhaps, with any one set of children, succeeded in preventing or stifling this kind of curiosity.  No part of the history of human thought would perhaps be more singular than the stratagems devised by young people in different situations to make themselves masters or witnesses of the secret.  And every discovery, due to their own inquiries, can but be so much oil poured upon an imagination in flames” (T.  Beddoes, Hygeia, 1802, vol. iii, p. 59).  Kaan, again, in one of the earliest books on morbid sexuality, sets down mystery as one of the causes of psychopathia sexualis.  Marro (La Puberta, p. 299) points out how the veil of mystery thrown over sexual matters merely serves to concentrate attention on them.  The distinguished Dutch writer Multatuli, in one of his letters (quoted with approval by Freud), remarks on the dangers of hiding things from boys and girls in a veil of mystery, pointing out that this must only heighten the curiosity of children, and so far from keeping them pure, which mere ignorance can never do, heats and perverts their imaginations.  Mrs. Mary Wood Allen, also, warns the mother (op. cit., p. 5) against the danger of allowing any air of embarrassing mystery to creep over these things.  “If the instructor feels any embarrassment in answering the queries of the child, he is not fitted to be the teacher, for the feeling of embarrassment will, in some subtle way, communicate itself to the child, and he will experience an indefinable sense of offended delicacy which is both unnecessary and undesirable.  Purification of one’s own thought is, then, the first step towards teaching the truth purely.  Why,” she adds, “is death, the gateway out of life, any more dignified or pathetic than birth, the gateway into life?  Or why is the taking of earthly life a more awful fact than the giving of life?” Mrs. Ennis Richmond, in a book of advice to mothers which contains many wise and true things, says:  “I want to insist, more strongly than upon anything else, that it is the secrecy that surrounds certain parts of the body and their functions that gives them their danger in the child’s thought.  Little children, from earliest years, are taught to think of these parts of their body as mysterious, and not only so, but that they are mysterious because they are unclean.  Children have not even a name for them.  If you have to speak to your child, you allude to them mysteriously and in a half-whisper as ’that little part of you that you don’t speak of,’ or words to that effect.  Before everything it is important that your child should have a good working name for these parts of his body, and for their functions, and that he should be taught to use and to hear the names, and that as naturally and openly as though he or you were speaking of his head or his foot.  Convention has, for various reasons, made it impossible to speak in this way in public.  But you can, at any rate, break