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This may be a stupid question, but ... "Can you really not use primitives in a collection?"

First Thoughts

In an attempt to understand boxing and unboxing, I was rooting around on the Java.sun.com site, and found the J2SE 5.0 page on Autoboxing.

On the first line, it says:

As any Java programmer knows, you can't put an int (or other primitive value) into a collection. Collections can only hold object references, so you have to box primitive values into the appropriate wrapper class (which is Integer in the case of int).

So I tried testing it out with the following code:

      public void boxItPrimitive(){
            int first = 1;
            int second = 2;
            int third = 3;
            ArrayList listONumbers = new ArrayList();
            listONumbers.add(first);
            listONumbers.add(second);
            listONumbers.add(third);
            for(int i=0; i< listONumbers.size(); i++){
                  System.out.println(listONumbers.get(i));
            }
      }

ArrayList implements the interface Collection, yet there are no Integers, just ints. To my surprise, I was able to compile and run this method! The output was:

1
2
3

Is there a reason I can input raw primitives into a collection without boxing them?