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is carried, in a great number of cases, to a scandalous extent. The most intimate liaisons are formed under this specious pretext; the same bed often receives the two friends. . . .
"We have seen letters from these young persons to each other, scarcely eleven or twelve years of age, the burning and passionate expressions of which made us shudder. The clandestine reading of certain books in which abject authors have traced, in the liveliest colors, the deplorable deviations of the senses, is another no less fatal circumstance which hastens the corruption of girls. One can affirm that this reading of romances, which so easily becomes the object of a veritable passion with young persons, is to-day one of the most active causes of their depravation."
With them, as with boys, the genital organs may be constitutionally endowed with excessive predominance of action, which masters all the affections, all the movements of the economy, and causes them to titillate incessantly that part of those organs which is the seat of the keenest sensibility. Very little girls are often thus borne along, by a kind of instinct, to commit masturbation. The famous Dr. Deslandes makes the astounding statement, which can only be true of the French nation, that "a great number of little girls, and the majority of adolescents, commit this crime!"
Human nature, however, is much the same the world over, and a habit so easily acquired and practiced, so little suspected, or entirely ignored, and which, for these and certain physical reasons, girls are even more liable to contract than boys, may well excite astonishment and alarm, and render the distinguished Frenchman's caution equally appropriate here: "There is no young girl who should not
