fails to take into account the sensitiveness of children to such impressions, and it is unnecessary, for it is just as easy to teach the dignity of life as the dignity of death.

The duty of the school to impart education in matters of sex to children has in recent years been vigorously and ably advocated by Maria Lischnewska (op. cit.), who speaks with thirty years’ experience as a teacher and an intimate acquaintance with children and their home life.  She argues that among the mass of the population to-day, while in the home-life there is every opportunity for coarse familiarity with sexual matters, there is no opportunity for a pure and enlightened introduction to them, parents being for the most part both morally and intellectually incapable of aiding their children here.  That the school should assume the leading part in this task is, she believes, in accordance with the whole tendency of modern civilized life.  She would have the instruction graduated in such a manner that during the fifth or sixth year of school life the pupil would receive instruction, with the aid of diagrams, concerning the sexual organs and functions of the higher mammals, the bull and cow being selected by preference.  The facts of gestation would of course be included.  When this stage was reached it would be easy to pass on to the human species with the statement:  “Just in the same way as the calf develops in the cow so the child develops in the mother’s body.”

It is difficult not to recognize the force of Maria Lischnewska’s argument, and it seems highly probable that, as she asserts, the instruction proposed lies in the course of our present path of progress.  Such instruction would be formal, unemotional, and impersonal; it would be given not as specific instruction in matters of sex, but simply as a part of natural history.  It would supplement, so far as mere knowledge is concerned, the information the child had already received from its mother.  But it would by no means supplant or replace the personal and intimate relationship of confidence between mother and child.  That is always to be aimed at, and though it may not be possible among the ill-educated masses of to-day, nothing else will adequately take its place.

There can be no doubt, however, that while in the future the school will most probably be regarded as the proper place in which to teach the elements of physiology—­and not as at present a merely emasculated and effeminated physiology—­the introduction of such reformed teaching is as yet impracticable in many communities.  A coarse and ill-bred community moves in a vicious circle.  Its members are brought up to believe that sex matters are filthy, and when they become adults they protest violently against their children being taught this filthy knowledge.  The teacher’s task is thus rendered at the best difficult, and under democratic conditions impossible.  We cannot, therefore, hope for any immediate introduction of sexual physiology into schools, even in the unobtrusive form in which alone it could properly be introduced, that is to say as a natural and inevitable part of general physiology.