At all events, if I have known Englishmen who were very debauched and very refined in vice, I have also known young men of the same nation, over twenty, who were as innocent as children, but never a young Frenchman, Italian, or Spaniard of whom this could be said." There is undoubtedly truth in this statement, though it must be remembered that, excellent as chastity is, if it is based on mere ignorance, its possessor is exposed to terrible dangers.
The question of sexual hygiene, more especially in its special aspect of sexual enlightenment, is not, however, dependent on the fact that in some children the psychic and nervous manifestation of sex appears at an earlier age than in others.

It rests upon the larger general fact that in all children the activity of intelligence begins to work at a very early age, and that this activity tends to manifest itself in an inquisitive desire to know many elementary facts of life which are really dependent on sex.

The primary and most universal of these desires is the desire to know where children come from.

No question could be more natural; the question of origins is necessarily a fundamental one in childish philosophies as, in more ultimate shapes, it is in adult philosophies.

Most children, either guided by the statements, usually the misstatements, of their elders, or by their own intelligence working amid such indications as are open to them, are in possession of a theory of the origin of babies.
Stanley Hall ("Contents of Children's Minds on Entering School," _Pedagogical Seminary_, June, 1891) has collected some of the beliefs of young children as to the origin of babies.