The girl between ten and sixteen is undergoing a metamorphosis just as sure as that caterpillar is undergoing a metamorphosis.  If you leave town for a few years and come back, you know all the old men and women haven’t changed any, except to die off.  The babies have grown some; but the boy and the girl seem to be grown all over again.  That is, the girl whom you left at nine years old and on coming back find her sixteen, has dropped down her skirts, has drawn up her hair, and that is the butterfly cocoon, and it is a mighty pretty butterfly cocoon.  That is waste again.  It is waste, waste, on all sides and all of that waste is going into the blood, no other place to put it; it ought to be got out at once.  But there is another thing about it; all the food must be digested, and so oxygen must be gained and waste must be eliminated.  All the organs in the trunk between those ages of ten and fourteen are relatively both larger and smaller in girls than at any other period of life.

It looks as though Nature was making a bad blunder, but she is really making the best of a very bad bargain, doing the best she can under hard circumstances.  With these small vital organs and this tremendous draught on the body for new material and the large amount of waste to be eliminated, you are sure to have trouble.  That trouble is going to manifest itself first of all in the blood.  The blood is going to be poor blood during those years, unless you remedy it.  Poor blood, first of all, depresses the nervous system, and the girl feels gloomy and good for nothing; she hates to go out into the cold air because she chills; yet that cold air is what she needs more than anything else in the world.  She hates to make an effort and won’t take the exercise she needs if she can possibly help it.  The exercise she must have.  Her appetite has gone all wrong.  She likes to live on caramels, pickles, and all such things as that.  Now, my friends, I want to tell you, when anything goes wrong with the appetite, then the whole system goes wrong, remember that.  Observations were made some years ago in Sweden of a number of the bodily disorders that occur between the ages of thirteen and nineteen.  These examiners found that there was one disorder which attacked, put in general numbers, sixty per cent. of the girls in the Swedish schools between the ages of thirteen and nineteen, and, indeed, it never fell below sixty per cent. and was usually a great deal more.  In Denmark, the examination was made in the field where the children are healthier, and then the figures gave forty per cent.  The troubles usually show themselves in the form of pallor; the girl is pale.  They frequently break out in the form of headache, loss of appetite, resistance to marked effort and sometimes with a cold.  Now, if the seat of the cold is in the blood, because it is loaded with waste and ought to be removed, there is one thing sure, that waste never will be removed until it is thoroughly oxidized.  That is the first thing to do, oxidize it.  The only way to oxidize the blood is to get the lungs full of good, pure air.