He was brought up in childhood with his own brothers and sisters and a little girl of the same age who had been adopted from infancy, the child of a prostitute who had died soon after the infant's birth.

The adopted child was treated as one of the family, and all the children supposed that she was a real sister.

Yet from early years she developed instincts unlike those of the children with whom she was nurtured; she lied, she was cruel, she loved to make mischief, and she developed precociously vicious sexual impulses; though carefully educated, she adopted the occupation of her mother, and at the age of twenty-two was exiled to Siberia for robbery and attempt to murder.

The child of a chance father and a prostitute mother is not fatally devoted to ruin; but such a child is ill-bred, and that fact, in some cases, may neutralize all the influences of good nurture.
When we reach the period of infancy we have already passed beyond the foundations and potentialities of the sexual life; we are in some cases witnessing its actual beginnings.

It is a well-established fact that auto-erotic manifestations may sometimes be observed even in infants of less than twelve months.