pupil-teachers. These twenty-three persons, who appeared in the dock,
had all reached an age at which they became liable to criminal
prosecution; in the case of a number of other boys and girls who were
concerned in the affair, no prosecution could take place. Ultimately,
all the accused were discharged, as it was held that when the offence
was committed they did not possess the requisite understanding of its
culpable character. But by order of the court several of the accused
were transferred to a reformatory. Since a prosecution may take place in
such cases, a conviction is also possible. It is evident that as soon as
a child is twelve years old, it may incur legal liabilities in
consequence of the activity of the sexual impulse.

We must not overlook the fact that the intellectual side of development
may be influenced by an early awakening of the sexual life, the child
inclining, in this case, to occupy its mind with sexual thoughts, to the
neglect of educational opportunities. I have seen cases which were
regarded as instances of aprosexia,[105] the lack of the power of
concentration being attributed to adenoid vegetations, but in which the
defect might, with at least as much reason, have been referred to the
play of sexual ideas. To the teacher, his pupil's inattentiveness is
often an insoluble riddle, merely because he ignores in the child the
play of erotic imagination, and, in fact, ignores the child's inner life
in general. And yet, in such cases, the child's failure to attend to the
work of the class sometimes depends upon nothing more than occupation
with thoughts about a beloved person. In other instances, the
inattention is due, not to sexual ideas, but to sexual acts. As a
patient of my own put the matter: in boyhood, while in the Latin class
he was supposed to be learning his _amo, amas, amat_, he and his
school-fellows were studying the subject practically beneath the table.
Naturally, the stronger the child's sexual impulse, the more will the
attention wander; and although in most cases, in children, the impulse
is comparatively weak, in isolated instances it may from the first be
abnormally powerful, entailing dangers to the intellectual development
as serious as those other dangers previously enumerated. According to
Sanford Bell, unfavourable consequences to intellectual development
cannot, as a general rule, be attributed to the early amatory
inclinations of childhood. All that is likely to be noti