accompany it through the days of lactation and
childhood, and very few children can fail to experience sexual
activities and feelings before the period of puberty" (Freud,
"Zur Sexuellen Aufklaerung der Kinder," _Soziale Medizin und
Hygiene_, Bd. ii, 1907; cf., for details, the same author's _Drei
Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie_, 1905). Moll, on the other hand,
considers that Freud's views on sexuality in infancy are
exaggerations which must be decisively rejected, though he admits
that it is difficult, if not impossible, to differentiate the
feelings in childhood (Moll, _Das Sexualleben des Kindes_, p.
154). Moll believes also that psycho-sexual manifestations
appearing after the age of eight are not pathological; children
who are weakly or of bad heredity are not seldom sexually
precocious, but, on the other hand, Moll has known children of
eight or nine with strongly developed sexual impulses, who yet
become finely developed men.

Rudimentary sexual activities in childhood, accompanied by sexual
feelings, must indeed--when they are not too pronounced or too
premature--be regarded as coming within the normal sphere, though
when they occur in children of bad heredity they are not without
serious risks. But in healthy children, after the age of seven or
eight, they tend to produce no evil results, and are strictly of
the nature of play. Play, both in animals and men, as Groos has
shown with marvelous wealth of illustration, is a beneficent
process of education; the young creature is thereby preparing
itself for the exercise of those functions which in later life it
must carry out more completely and more seriously. In his _Spiele
der Menschen_, Groos applies this idea to the sexual play of
children, and brings forward quotations from literature in
evidence. Keller, in his "Romeo und Juliet auf dem Dorfe," has
given an admirably truthful picture of these childish
love-relationships. Emil Schultze-Malkowsky (_Geschlecht und
Gesellschaft_, Bd. ii, p. 370) reproduces some scenes from the
life of a little girl of seven clearly illustrating the exact
nature of the sexual manifestation at this age.

A kind of rudimentary sexual intercourse between children, as
Bloch has remarked (_Beitraege_, etc., Bd. ii, p. 254), occurs in
many parts of the world, and is recognized by their eld