channel for which there is no
obvious use, while the pudendal cleft would not suggest itself to
girls (and still less to boys) as the gate of birth, since it
already appears to be monopolized by the urinary excretion. This
belief concerning the navel is sometimes preserved through the
whole period of adolescence, especially in girls of the so-called
educated class, who are too well-bred to discuss the matter with
their married friends, and believe indeed that they are already
sufficiently well informed. At this age the belief may not be
altogether harmless, in so far as it leads to the real gate of
sex being left unguarded. In Elsass where girls commonly believe,
and are taught, that babies come through the navel, popular
folk-tales are current (_Anthropophyteia_, vol. iii, p. 89)
which represent the mistakes resulting from this belief as
leading to the loss of virginity.

Freud, who believes that children give little credit to the stork
fable and similar stories invented for their mystification, has
made an interesting psychological investigation into the real
theories which children themselves, as the result of observation
and thought, reach concerning the sexual facts of life (S. Freud,
"Ueber Infantile Sexualtheorien," _Sexual-Probleme_, Dec., 1908).
Such theories, he remarks, correspond to the brilliant, but
defective hypotheses which primitive peoples arrive at concerning
the nature and origin of the world. There are three theories,
which, as Freud quite truly concludes, are very commonly formed
by children. The first, and the most widely disseminated, is that
there is no real anatomical difference between boys and girls; if
the boy notices that his little sister has no obvious penis he
even concludes that it is because she is too young, and the
little girl herself takes the same view. The fact that in early
life the clitoris is relatively larger and more penis-like helps
to confirm this view which Freud connects with the tendency in
later life to erotic dream of women furnished with a penis. This
theory, as Freud also remarks, favors the growth of homosexuality
when its germs are present. The second theory is the faecal theory
of the origin of babies. The child, who perhaps thinks his mother
has a penis, and is in any case ignorant of the vagina, concludes
that the b