leading up to human beings, the matter being thus robbed of its unwholesome mystery.  Mrs. Ennis Richmond (Boyhood, p. 62) recommends that children should be sent to spend some of their time upon a farm, so that they may not only become acquainted with the general facts of the natural world, but also with the sexual lives of animals, learning things which it is difficult to teach verbally.  Karina Karin ("Wie erzieht man ein Kind zuer wissenden Keuschheit?” Geschlecht und Gesellschaft, Jahrgang I, Heft 4), reproducing some of her talks with her nine-year old son, from the time that he first asked her where children came from, shows how she began with telling him about flowers, to pass on to fish and birds, and finally to the facts of human pregnancy, showing him pictures from an obstetrical manual of the child in its mother’s body.  It may be added that the advisability of beginning the sex teaching of children with the facts of botany was repeatedly emphasized by various speakers at the special meeting of the German Congress for Combating Venereal Disease devoted to the subject of sexual instruction (Sexualpaedagogik, especially pp. 36, 47, 76).

The transition from botany to the elementary zooelogy of the lower animals, to human anatomy and physiology, and to the science of anthropology based on these, is simple and natural.  It is not likely to be taken in detail until the age of puberty.  Sex enters into all these subjects and should not be artificially excluded from them in the education of either boys or girls.  The text-books from which the sexual system is entirely omitted ought no longer to be tolerated.  The nature and secretion of the testicles, the meaning of the ovaries and of menstruation, as well as the significance of metabolism and the urinary excretion, should be clear in their main lines to all boys and girls who have reached the age of puberty.

At puberty there arises a new and powerful reason why boys and girls should receive definite instruction in matters of sex.  Before that age it is possible for the foolish parent to imagine that a child may be preserved in ignorant innocence.[25] At puberty that belief is obviously no longer possible.  The efflorescence of puberty with the development of the sexual organs, the appearance of hair in unfamiliar places, the general related organic changes, the spontaneous and perhaps alarming occurrence in boys of seminal emissions, and in girls of menstruation, the unaccustomed and sometimes acute recognition of sexual desire accompanied by new sensations in the sexual organs and leading perhaps to masturbation; all these arouse, as we cannot fail to realize, a new anxiety in the boy’s or girl’s mind, and a new curiosity, all the more acute in many cases because it is carefully concealed as too private, and even too shameful, to speak of to anyone.  In boys, especially if of sensitive temperament, the suffering thus caused may be keen and prolonged.