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Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 - Sex in Relation to Society by Havelock Ellis
page 64 of 983 (06%)
disputable point as to how far such manifestations at this age can be
called normal.[18] A slight degree of menstrual and mammary activity
sometimes occurs at birth.[19] It seems clear that nervous and psychic
sexual activity has its first springs at this early period, and as the
years go by an increasing number of individuals join the stream until at
puberty practically all are carried along in the great current.

While, therefore, it is possibly, even probably, true that the soundest
and healthiest individuals show no definite signs of nervous and psychic
sexuality in childhood, such manifestations are still sufficiently
frequent to make it impossible to say that sexual hygiene may be
completely ignored until puberty is approaching.

Precocious physical development occurs as a somewhat rare
variation. W. Roger Williams ("Precocious Sexual Development with
Abstracts of over One Hundred Cases," _British Gynæcological
Journal_, May, 1902) has furnished an important contribution to
the knowledge of this anomaly which is much commoner in girls
than in boys. Roger Williams's cases include only twenty boys to
eighty girls, and precocity is not only more frequent but more
pronounced in girls, who have been known to conceive at eight,
while thirteen is stated to be the earliest age at which boys
have proved able to beget children. This, it may be remarked, is
also the earliest age at which spermatozoa are found in the
seminal fluid of boys; before that age the ejaculations contain
no spermatozoa, and, as Fürbringer and Moll have found, they may
even be absent at sixteen, or later. In female children
precocious sexual development is less commonly associated with
general increase of bodily development than in boys. (An
individual case of early sexual development in a girl of five has
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