ting to the individual. Although after puberty the
sexual organs are capable of reproduction, yet it by no means follows
that they should be used for that purpose. Their early activity is
intended for the perfection of the body and mind, and not for the
continuation of the species.

VERY EARLY MARRIAGE,

therefore, should be avoided, because the nervous force expended in
amative indulgence is imperatively required in both sexes for
developing the physical and mental faculties. The zoosperms produced
by the male in the first years of puberty are inferior in power and
less capable of producing healthy offspring than those of mature
years. The early germs, also, of the female are less fitted for
fecundation than those that appear later in life; nature evidently
intending these early efforts to be used on the individuals themselves
in building up their bodies, strengthening their minds, and preparing
them to reproduce their species in maturer years. There is a serious
day of reckoning for early indulgence; for precocious persons (unless
their constitutions are as powerful as their desires) who give way to
their passions at their first exactions, barter their youth for their
enjoyment, and are old and weary of the world at an age when people of
more moderate habits are only in the meridian of pleasure and
existence.

GENERALLY THE BEST AGE TO MARRY,

where the health is perfect, is from twenty-one to twenty-five in the
male and from eighteen to twenty-one in the female. As a general rule,
marriages earlier than this are injurious and detrimental to health.
Men who marry too young, unless they are of cold and phlegmatic
constitution, and thus moderate in their conduct, become partially
bald, dim of sight, and lose all elasticity of limb in a few years;
while women in a like position rarely have any bloom on their cheek or
fire in their eye by the time they are twenty-five. And all profound
physiologists agree that from the same cause the mental faculties
suffer in the same ratio.

A medium, however, is to be observed. It is not well to defer till
middle age the period of connubial intercourse; for too tedious
spinsterhood is as much calculated to hasten the decay of beauty as
too early a marriage. Hence, there is rarely any freshness to be seen
in a maiden of thirty; while the matron of that age, if her life has
been a happy one, and her hymeneal condition of not more than