highly praised.  Most of these books are intended for quite young children, and while they explain more or less clearly the origin of babies, nearly always starting with the facts of plant life, they touch very slightly, if at all, on the relations of the sexes.

Mrs. Ennis Richmond’s books, largely addressed to mothers, deal with these questions in a very sane, direct, and admirable manner, and Canon Lyttelton’s books, discussing such questions generally, are also excellent.  Most of the books now to be mentioned are intended to be read by boys and girls who have reached the age of puberty.  They refer more or less precisely to sexual relationships, and they usually touch on masturbation. The Story of Life, written by a very accomplished woman, the late Ellice Hopkins, is somewhat vague, and introduces too many exalted religious ideas.  Arthur Trewby’s Healthy Boyhood is a little book of wholesome tendency; it deals specially with masturbation. A Talk with Boys About Themselves and A Talk with Girls About Themselves, both by Edward Bruce Kirk (the latter book written in conjunction with a lady) deal with general as well as sexual hygiene.  There could be no better book to put into the hands of a boy or girl at puberty than M.A.  Warren’s Almost Fourteen, written by an American school teacher in 1892.  It was a most charming and delicately written book, which could not have offended the innocence of the most sensitive maiden.  Nothing, however, is sacred to prurience, and it was easy for the prurient to capture the law and obtain (in 1897) legal condemnation of this book as “obscene.”  Anything which sexually excites a prurient mind is, it is true, “obscene” for that mind, for, as Mr. Theodore Schroeder remarks, obscenity is “the contribution of the reading mind,” but we need such books as this in order to diminish the number of prurient minds, and the condemnation of so entirely admirable a book makes, not for morality, but for immorality.  I am told that the book was subsequently issued anew with most of its best portions omitted, and it is stated by Schroeder (Liberty of Speech and Press Essential to Purity Propaganda, p. 34) that the author was compelled to resign his position as a public school principal.  Maria Lischnewska’s Geschlechtliche Belehrung der Kinder (reprinted from Mutterschutz, 1905, Heft 4 and 5) is a most admirable and thorough discussion of the whole question of sexual education, though the writer is more interested in the teacher’s share in this question than in the mother’s.  Suggestions to mothers are contained in Hugo Salus, Wo kommen die Kinder her?, E. Stiehl, Eine Mutterpflicht, and many other books.  Dr. Alfred Kind strongly recommends Ludwig Gurlitt’s Der Verkehr mit meinem Kindern, more especially in its combination of sexual education with artistic education.  Many similar books are referred to by Bloch, in his Sexual Life of Our Time,