life so much as in the sexual
relationships is the influence of good breeding more decisive. An
instructive illustration may be gleaned from the minute and
precise history of his early life furnished to me by a highly
cultured Russian gentleman. He was brought up in childhood with
his own brothers and sisters and a little girl of the same age
who had been adopted from infancy, the child of a prostitute who
had died soon after the infant's birth. The adopted child was
treated as one of the family, and all the children supposed that
she was a real sister. Yet from early years she developed
instincts unlike those of the children with whom she was
nurtured; she lied, she was cruel, she loved to make mischief,
and she developed precociously vicious sexual impulses; though
carefully educated, she adopted the occupation of her mother, and
at the age of twenty-two was exiled to Siberia for robbery and
attempt to murder. The child of a chance father and a prostitute
mother is not fatally devoted to ruin; but such a child is
ill-bred, and that fact, in some cases, may neutralize all the
influences of good nurture.

When we reach the period of infancy we have already passed beyond the
foundations and potentialities of the sexual life; we are in some cases
witnessing its actual beginnings. It is a well-established fact that
auto-erotic manifestations may sometimes be observed even in infants of
less than twelve months. We are not now called upon to discuss the
disputable point as to how far such manifestations at this age can be
called normal.[18] A slight degree of menstrual and mammary activity
sometimes occurs at birth.[19] It seems clear that nervous and psychic
sexual activity has its first springs at this early period, and as the
years go by an increasing number of individuals join the stream until at
puberty practically all are carried along in the great current.

While, therefore, it is possibly, even probably, true that the soundest
and healthiest individuals show no definite signs of nervous and psychic
sexuality in childhood, such manifestations are still sufficiently
frequent to make it impossible to say that sexual hygiene may be
completely ignored until puberty is approaching.

Precocious physical development occurs as a somewhat rare
variation. W. Roger Williams ("Precocious Sexual Development with
Abstracts of over One Hundred Cas