course, when we were at school [at the age of twelve and earlier] we used to play with one another, several of us girls; we used to go into a field and pretend we were doctors and had to examine one another, and then we used to pull up one another's clothes and feel each other." These games do not necessarily involve the coöperation of the sexual impulse, and still less have they any element of love. But emotions of love, scarcely if at all distinguishable from adult sexual love, frequently appear at equally early ages. They are of the nature of play, in so far as play is a preparation for the activities of later life, though, unlike the games, they are not felt as play. Ramdohr, more than a century ago (_Venus Urania_, 1798), referred to the frequent love of little boys for women. More usually the love is felt towards individuals of the opposite or the same sex who are not widely different in age, though usually older. The most comprehensive study of the matter has been made by Sanford Bell in America on a basis of as many as 2,300 cases (S. Bell, "A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love Between the Sexes," _American Journal Psychology_, July, 1902). Bell finds that the presence of the emotion between three and eight years of age is shown by such actions as hugging, kissing, lifting each other, scuffling, sitting close to each other, confessions to each other and to others, talking about each other when apart, seeking each other and excluding the rest, grief at separation, giving gifts, showing special courtesies to each other, making sacrifices for each other, exhibiting jealousy. The girls are, on the whole, more aggressive than the boys, and less anxious to keep the matter secret. After the age of eight, the girls increase in modesty and the boys become still more secretive. The physical sensations are not usually located in the sexual organs; erection of the penis and hyperæmia of the female sexual parts Bell regards as marking undue precocity. But there is diffused vascular and nervous tumescence and a state of exaltation comparable, though not equal, to that experienced in adolescent and adult age. On the whole, as Bell soundly concludes, "love between children of opposite sex bears much the same relation to that between adults as the flower does to the fruit, and has about as little of physical sexuality in it as an apple-blossom has of the apple that develops from it." Moll also (op. cit. p. 76) considers that kissing and other similar superficial contacts, which he denominates the phenomena of contrectation, constitute most frequently the first and sole manifestation of the sexual impulse in childhood.