orted. Dr.
Moll honors his readers by a frankness which may seem brutal to some of
them. It is necessary.

With dignity and frankness Dr. Moll combines notable good sense. In the
case of any exciting movement in advance of traditional custom, the
forerunners are likely to combine a certain one-sidedness and lack of
balance with their really valuable progressive ideas. The greater
sagacity and critical power are more often found amongst the men of
science who avoid public discussion of exciting social or moral reforms,
and are suspicious of startling and revolutionary doctrines or
practices. It is therefore fortunate that a book on the sexual life
during childhood should have been written by a man of critical,
matter-of-fact mind, of long experience as a medical specialist, and of
wide scholarship, who has no private interest in any exciting
psychological doctrine or educational panacea.

The translation of this book will be welcomed by men and women from many
different professions, but alike in the need of preparation to guide the
sex-life of boys and girls and to meet emergencies caused by its
corruption by weakness within or attack from without. Of the clergymen
in this country who are in real touch with the lives of their charges,
there is hardly a one who does not, every so often, have to minister to
a mind whose moral and religious distress depends on an unfortunate sex
history. Conscientious and observant teachers realize, in a dim way,
that they cannot do justice to even the purely intellectual needs of
pupils without understanding the natural history of those instinctive
impulses, which, concealed and falsified as they are under our
traditional taboos, nevertheless retain enormous potency. The facts, so
clearly shown in the present volume, that the life of sex begins long
before its obvious manifestations at puberty, and that the direction of
its vaguer and less differentiated habits in these earlier years is as
important as its hygiene at the more noticeable climax of the early
'teens, increase the teacher's responsibility. Moreover, there is
probably not a teacher of ten years' standing who has not faced--or by
ignorance neglected--some emergency where moderate insight into the laws
whereby the vague instincts of sex are turned into healthy and unhealthy
habits, and form right and wrong attitudes, could have rescued a boy or
girl from years of wretched anxiety, or degraded conduct, or both.

The social work