.[308] Kellogg, in America, says it is equally prevalent
in both sexes, but that women are more secretive. Morris, also in America,
considers, on the other hand, that persistent masturbation is commoner in
women, and accounts for this by the healthier life and traditions of boys.
Pouillet, who studied the matter with considerable thoroughness in France,
came to the conclusion that masturbation is commoner among women, among
whom he found it to be equally prevalent in rich and poor, and especially
so in the great centres of civilization. In Russia, Guttceit states in his
_Dreissig Jahre Praxis_, that from the ages of 10 to 16 boys masturbate
more than girls, who know less about the practice which has not for them
the charm of the forbidden, but after 16 he finds the practice more
frequent in girls and women than in youths and men. Naecke, in Germany,
believes that there is much evidence pointing in the same direction, and
Adler considers masturbation very common in women. Moraglia is decidedly
of the opinion, on the ground of his own observations already alluded to,
that masturbation is more frequent among women; he refers to the fact--a
very significant fact, as I shall elsewhere have to point out--that, while
in man there is only one sexual centre, the penis, in woman there are
several centres,--the clitoris, the vagina, the uterus, the
breasts,[309]--and he mentions that he knew a prostitute, a well-developed
brunette of somewhat nervous temperament, who boasted that she knew
fourteen ways of masturbating herself.

My own opinion is that the question of the sexual distribution of
masturbation has been somewhat obscured by that harmful tendency, to which
I have already alluded, to concentrate attention on a particular set of
auto-erotic phenomena. We must group and divide our facts rationally if we
wish to command them. If we confine our attention to very young children,
the available evidence shows that the practice is much more common in
females,[310] and such a result is in harmony with the fact that
precocious puberty is most often found in female children.[311] At
puberty and adolescence occasional or frequent masturbation is common in
both boys and girls, though, I believe, less common than is sometimes
supposed; it is difficult to say whether it is more prevalent among boys
or girls; one is inclined to conclude that it prevails more widely among
boys. The sexual impulse, and consequently the tendency to masturbati