It has been found an exceedingly difficult thing to determine at what precise period the desire of the boy for the girl, and that of the girl for the boy, first manifests itself definitely. Dr. Connolly Norman states1 that "the sexual passion, at its first appearance, is always indefinite, and easily turned in a wrong directionGodard describes the little boys in Cairo as playing sexually with both boys and girls, indifferently;* and we have only to go back in memory to our own sexual awakening to be convinced of the fact that it was governed very little, if at all, by the later laws of normal heterosexual feeling.

The desire simply began to stir within us, seeking satisfaction precisely as does the hunger of the infant, without a thought or concept as to the source or character of its food; and this blind groping of instinct along the sexual borderland, so to speak, the undifferentiated "indecision between love and friendship," as Tarde calls it, not only natural but common to the awakening consciousness, were we privileged to wander afield, would constitute a very charming subject for metaphysical inquiry.

The Law Of Nature

Nature aims at a decided and complete prenatal differentiation of sex; but Nature, as Aristotle well says, while she wishes, has not always the power to perform; and hence result not only the double acorn, and the bisexual flower, but those remarkable cases of so-called hermaphrodism, comparatively rare, however, in which the sex-line is so feebly drawn that real men have been known to wear female clothing, and cohabit by preference with men all their lives; and other individuals, with distinct masculine development, have felt from childhood sexual desire only for men, with a corresponding indifference for women.