id leading the child to dwell too much upon sexual
topics, and fortunately human beings have numerous other interests. The
sphere of the sexual must be regarded as a fraction merely of the
general educational field. The inculcation of true ideas of morality,
and of a sense of honour not confined to externals but one by which the
entire being is permeated--these will be the safest essentials of a good
sexual and general education.

[1] _Infancy_ appears to be the best English term to represent
the German _Saenglingsalter_, literally "age of suckling." It is
true that the _legal_ denotation of the term _infancy_ is "the
period from a person's birth to the attainment of the age of
twenty-one years," but in common speech an _infant_ is "a child
during the first two or three years of life," whilst writers on
_infant mortality_ restrict the term to the sense employed in the
text. Thus Newman, in _The Health of the State_ (p. 108), writes:
"Infants are children under twelve months of age."--TRANSLATOR'S
NOTE.

[2] _Involuntary Sexual Orgasm._--This is a very cumbrous
rendering of the German _Pollution_. In English we greatly need a
general term, first, to denote all involuntary emissions of
semen, whether nocturnal or diurnal; and, secondly, to denote
involuntary sexual orgasm in the female as well as in the male.
In the case of the female, the term "seminal emission" is
inapplicable; but the term "pollution" may be applied in English
(as it is in German) to such phenomena in either sex. By American
writers the term "pollution" is now generally used (_e.g._,
Allen, "Disorders of the Male Sexual Organs," _Twentieth Century
Practice_, vol. vii. p. 612 _et seq._). My first inclination,
therefore, was to adopt the rendering "pollution" in this
translation. But this word inevitably connotes the ideas of
physical uncleanness and moral defilement, and its use would thus
assist the survival of medieval ideas of the essentially corrupt
nature of sexual passion--such ideas as are exemplified by the
quaint survival among certain "occultists" of the medieval
doctrine of _incubi_ and _succubi_, by the belief that sexual
dreams are induced by the "thought-forms" of other persons
tormented by ungratified sexual desire! For this reason I have
not attempted to acclimatise the word "pollution" in this
country.--TRANSLATOR'S NOTE.

[3] _L'Hygiene sexuelle_, Paris, 1895, p. 27.

[4] Thalhofer, _Die Sexuelle Paedagogik bei den Philanthrop