intimate terms with their children, and on suitable occasions, when this feeling of intimacy is strong, children should be encouraged to speak freely and to ask for explanations.  By a judicious use of such opportunities piece by piece the whole may be unfolded.  In order that the child may approach the subject in the proper spirit we may stimulate interest by a few lessons in Natural History.  A child of eight or ten years of age is not too young to learn a little of the outlines of anatomy and physiology.  If he is told a few bald facts about the skeleton, about the circulation and the processes of digestion such as any parent can teach at the cost of a few hours’ study of a handbook, this will lead naturally enough, in later lessons, to a similar talk upon the excretory organs, reproduction, and the anatomy and processes of sex, suitable to the individual.  To achieve “depolarisation,” there is nothing more efficacious than the frankness and explicitness of scientific statement, however elementary.  Later a little knowledge of Botany and Zoology will enable a parent to sketch briefly the outlines of fertilisation and reproduction.  The child may grasp the conception that the life of all individual plants and animals is directed towards the single aim of continuing the species.  He can be told how the bee carries the male pollen to the female flower, how all living things habitually conjugate, the lowest in the scale of development as well as the highest, and how the fertilised egg becomes the embryo which is hatched by the mother or born of her.  As the child grows older and understands more and more of these natural processes an opportunity can be used to make the presentation of the subject more personal.  He can be told that during childhood his own sexual processes have been undeveloped, but that as he grows older they will awake.  That with their awakening in adolescence new temptations to self-indulgence in thought or action may assail him, but that these temptations are delayed by the wisdom of Nature until his understanding has grown and his man’s strength of character has developed.  A high ideal of purity should be set before boy and girl alike, and the conception of sex from the beginning should be associated in their minds with the high purpose to which some day it may be put.  Before the boy goes to a boarding-school he should have imbibed from his father the desire for moral cleanliness, the knowledge of good and of evil, and a cordial dislike for everything that is sensual, self-indulgent, or nasty.  Talks on such subjects should be very infrequent, but I believe that, if “depolarisation” is to be achieved, they must be repeated every now and then during later childhood and in adolescence.  To attempt to impart all this interesting information in a single constrained and awkward interview is to court failure, or at least to run the risk that the explanation is not fully understood, so that the child is mystified, or even offended in his sense of propriety.