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 (_Beiträge_, etc., Bd. ii, p. 254), occurs in many parts of the world, and is recognized by their elders as play. This is, for instance, the case among the Bawenda of the Transvaal (_Zeitschrift für Ethnologie_, 1896, Heft 4, p. 364), and among the Papuans of Kaiser-Wilhelms-Land, with the approval of the parents, although much reticence is observed (id., 1889, Heft 1, p. 16). Godard (_Egypte et Palestine_, 1867, p. 105) noted the sexual play of the boys and girls in Cairo. In New Mexico W.A. Hammond (_Sexual Impotence_, p. 107) has seen boys and girls attempting a playful sexual conjunction with the encouragement of men and women, and in New York he has seen boys and girls of three and four doing the same in the presence of their parents, with only a laughing rebuke. "Playing at pa and ma" is indeed extremely common among children in genuine innocence, and with a complete absence of viciousness; and is by no means confined to children of low social class. Moll remarks on its frequency (_Libido Sexualis_, Bd. i, p. 277), and the committee of evangelical pastors, in their investigation of German rural morality (_Die Geschlechtliche-sittliche Verhältnisse_, Bd. i, p. 102) found that children who are not yet of school age make attempts at coitus. The sexual play of children is by no means confined to father and mother games; frequently there are games of school with the climax in exposure and smackings, and occasionally there are games of being doctors and making examinations. Thus a young English woman says: "Of