es," _British Gynaecological
Journal_, May, 1902) has furnished an important contribution to
the knowledge of this anomaly which is much commoner in girls
than in boys. Roger Williams's cases include only twenty boys to
eighty girls, and precocity is not only more frequent but more
pronounced in girls, who have been known to conceive at eight,
while thirteen is stated to be the earliest age at which boys
have proved able to beget children. This, it may be remarked, is
also the earliest age at which spermatozoa are found in the
seminal fluid of boys; before that age the ejaculations contain
no spermatozoa, and, as Fuerbringer and Moll have found, they may
even be absent at sixteen, or later. In female children
precocious sexual development is less commonly associated with
general increase of bodily development than in boys. (An
individual case of early sexual development in a girl of five has
been completely described and figured in the _Zeitschrift fuer
Ethnologie_, 1896, Heft 4, p. 262.)

Precocious sexual impulses are generally vague, occasional, and
more or less innocent. A case of rare and pronounced character,
in which a child, a boy, from the age of two had been sexually
attracted to girls and women, and directed all his thoughts and
actions to sexual attempts on them, has been described by Herbert
Rich, of Detroit (_Alienist and Neurologist_, Nov., 1905).
General evidence from the literature of the subject as to sexual
precocity, its frequency and significance, has been brought
together by L.M. Terman ("A Study in Precocity," _American
Journal Psychology_, April, 1905).

The erections that are liable to occur in male infants have
usually no sexual significance, though, as Moll remarks, they may
acquire it by attracting the child's attention; they are merely
reflex. It is believed by some, however, and notably by Freud,
that certain manifestations of infant activity, especially
thumb-sucking, are of sexual causation, and that the sexual
impulse constantly manifests itself at a very early age. The
belief that the sexual instinct is absent in childhood, Freud
regards as a serious error, so easy to correct by observation
that he wonders how it can have arisen. "In reality," he remarks,
"the new-born infant brings sexuality with it into the world,
sexual sensations