This objection to animal physiology by no means applies, however, to botany.  There can be little doubt that botany is of all the natural sciences that which best admits of this incidental instruction in the fundamental facts of sex, when we are concerned with children below the age of puberty.  There are at least two reasons why this should be so.  In the first place botany really presents the beginnings of sex, in their most naked and essential forms; it makes clear the nature, origin, and significance of sex.  In the second place, in dealing with plants the facts of sex can be stated to children of either sex or any age quite plainly and nakedly without any reserve, for no one nowadays regards the botanical facts of sex as in any way offensive.  The expounder of sex in plants also has on his side the advantage of being able to assert, without question, the entire beauty of the sexual process.  He is not confronted by the ignorance, bad education, and false associations which have made it so difficult either to see or to show the beauty of sex in animals.  From the sex-life of plants to the sex-life of the lower animals there is, however, but a step which the teacher, according to his discretion, may take.

An early educational authority, Salzmann, in 1785 advocated the sexual enlightenment of children by first teaching them botany, to be followed by zooelogy.  In modern times the method of imparting sex knowledge to children by means, in the first place, of botany, has been generally advocated, and from the most various quarters.  Thus Marro (La Puberta, p. 300) recommends this plan.  J. Hudrey-Menos ("La Question du Sexe dans l’Education,” Revue Socialiste, June, 1895), gives the same advice.  Rudolf Sommer, in a paper entitled “Maedchenerziehung oder Menschenbildung?” (Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Jahrgang I, Heft 3) recommends that the first introduction of sex knowledge to children should be made by talking to them on simple natural history subjects; “there are endless opportunities,” he remarks, “over a fairy-tale, or a walk, or a fruit, or an egg, the sowing of seed or the nest-building of birds.”  Canon Lyttelton (Training of the Young in Laws of Sex, pp. 74 et seq.) advises a somewhat similar method, though laying chief stress on personal confidence between the child and his mother; “reference is made to the animal world just so far as the child’s knowledge extends, so as to prevent the new facts from being viewed in isolation, but the main emphasis is laid on his feeling for his mother and the instinct which exists in nearly all children of reverence due to the maternal relation;” he adds that, however difficult the subject may seem, the essential facts of paternity must also be explained to boys and girls alike.  Keyes, again (New York Medical Journal, Feb. 10, 1906), advocates teaching children from an early age the sexual facts of plant life and also concerning insects and other lower animals, and so gradually