children, succeeded in preventing or stifling this kind of
curiosity. No part of the history of human thought would perhaps
be more singular than the stratagems devised by young people in
different situations to make themselves masters or witnesses of
the secret. And every discovery, due to their own inquiries, can
but be so much oil poured upon an imagination in flames" (T.
Beddoes, _Hygeia_, 1802, vol. iii, p. 59). Kaan, again, in one of
the earliest books on morbid sexuality, sets down mystery as one
of the causes of _psychopathia sexualis_. Marro (_La Pubertà_, p.
299) points out how the veil of mystery thrown over sexual
matters merely serves to concentrate attention on them. The
distinguished Dutch writer Multatuli, in one of his letters
(quoted with approval by Freud), remarks on the dangers of hiding
things from boys and girls in a veil of mystery, pointing out
that this must only heighten the curiosity of children, and so
far from keeping them pure, which mere ignorance can never do,
heats and perverts their imaginations. Mrs. Mary Wood Allen,
also, warns the mother (op. cit., p. 5) against the danger of
allowing any air of embarrassing mystery to creep over these
things. "If the instructor feels any embarrassment in answering
the queries of the child, he is not fitted to be the teacher, for
the feeling of embarrassment will, in some subtle way,
communicate itself to the child, and he will experience an
indefinable sense of offended delicacy which is both unnecessary
and undesirable. Purification of one's own thought is, then, the
first step towards teaching the truth purely. Why," she adds, "is
death, the gateway out of life, any more dignified or pathetic
than birth, the gateway into life? Or why is the taking of
earthly life a more awful fact than the giving of life?" Mrs.
Ennis Richmond, in a book of advice to mothers which contains