, the educationalists have taken part
in the movement in favour of sexual enlightenment. But when we consider
the enormous importance and great frequency of the sexual processes of
the child, we are positively astounded at the manner in which this
department of knowledge has been ignored by those who have written on
the science and art of education, and by those psychologists who have
occupied themselves in the study of the mind of the child. Has it been a
false notion of morality by which these investigators have been withheld
from the elucidation of the sexual life of the child? Or has the reason
merely been their defective powers of observation? As a matter of fact,
I suppose that both these causes have operated in producing this
remarkable gap in our knowledge.

A certain amount of material is to be found in a number of books on
zoology, and also in a few quite recent works on comparative psychology.
Among works of the former class I mention especially that of Brehm, who
has reported a considerable number of individual details; of books on
comparative psychology, one of the most useful for our purposes is that
of Groos,[6] who gives us much valuable information regarding love-games
of young animals.

I may also point out that in the autobiographies, biographies, memoirs,
&c., of celebrated persons, we find much information regarding premature
amatory sentiments. Goethe, in his _Wahrheit und Dichtung_, relates that
as a boy of ten or so he fell in love with a young Frenchwoman, the
sister of his friend Derones. Of Alfred de Musset, his brother and
biographer, Paul Musset, records that at the early age of four he was
passionately in love with a girl cousin. It is on record that Dante fell
in love at the age of nine, Canova at five, and Alfieri at ten. Well
known also is the story of Byron's love, at eight years of age, for Mary
Duff. Moebius tells us of himself that when a boy of ten he was
desperately enamoured of a young married woman. We are told of Napoleon
I. that when a boy of nine he fell in love with his father's cousin, a
handsome woman of thirty, then on a visit to his home, and that he
caressed her in the most passionate manner. Belonging to an earlier day
was Felix Platter, the celebrated Swiss physician of the sixteenth
century, who tells us in his autobiography that when he was a child he
loved to be kissed by a certain young married woman. In _Un Coeur
Simple_, Flaubert describes the development of the