Environment and education are extremely comprehensive terms as used in psychology. Environment does not merely refer to the home with its visible surroundings, nor does education merely refer to the scholastic side of it. Environment and education include the treatment of the child by the nurse during the first week of life; for instance, whether she leaves it alone when it cries, or whether she soothes it and rocks it to sleep again. A trivial fact, the reader will think, especially in the first week of the child’s life, yet experience shows us that this environment and education of the first week is an extremely important factor in its after-life. The thousand little actions, the trivial chance words of anger or contempt, not merely of the parent but of strangers or of other children, all make their impressions on the infantile unconscious mind. They all belong, in the strictest sense, to what we term its environment and education. Any stimulus, in fact, however small, which is capable of reaching the brain forms part of this environment and education which is reacting on the child. Psychologists are now generally of the opinion that the essential elements of the individual character have all been definitely formed by the age of five, and that, important as training in successive years may be, the environment and education during those first five years are more important still. _It is the object of education and environment to modify and utilise the force of the primitive instincts with which the child comes into the world in the best possible way._ _Three things may happen to any particular instinct._ Firstly, it may remain unchanged and unrepressed, in which case the individual will be said, on reaching adult life, to be perverted in some way. Let us take as an example that instinct which exists in some animals, and which urges them at the mating season to exhibit their genital organs to their fellows of the opposite sex, with the perfectly natural and proper end in view of propagating the species. We occasionally find adult human beings in whom this instinct has remained unchanged and uncontrolled, and they generally find their way, sooner or later, into prison. The psychological term for the offence they commit is “exhibitionism.” In the small child, however, we have often seen this instinct at work, without regarding it as objectionable in any way. We have laughed at the little child who delights in running about naked, or asks us to come and see it being bathed, or on occasion calls even more obvious attention to its state of nakedness. It is quite unconscious of the primitive instinct which it is displaying, and since it is a child and cannot in any way fulfil the sexual objects of the instinct, we pass the matter over, without further thought.