n total ignorance of
the facts: his elder brother had never confided them to him. And so
again with the third boy. Evidently the boys had considered it too
sacred a thing to talk about--how much too sacred, then, to allow of
their joining in with the unclean gossip of schoolboys! Its only result
was to give them an added tenderness for their mother, and to make them
resent all such unclean talk as so much mud flung at her.

So far, so good. But we all of us realize that it is not the facts of
birth, but the facts of the origination of life, that form the
perennial source of obscene talk, and often of obscene action, among
boys; and it is in explaining these, without violating those instincts
of reserve and modesty with which nature herself surrounds the whole
subject, that what often seems an insuperable difficulty arises. Yet
these functions are, and must be, the very shrine of a body which is a
temple of the Lord and Giver of life; and on the face of things,
therefore, there must be some method of conveying pure knowledge to the
opening mind with regard to them. The difficulty must be with ourselves,
and not in the very nature of things themselves.

Has it not been created in a great measure by a wrong method? We begin
with human life instead of ending with it; we isolate it from a great
system to which it belongs, and treat what is "the roof and crown of
things" as a roof that tops no fair edifice, and is therefore anomalous;
as a crown that rests on a head which has been severed from its body,
and is therefore unmeaning. We obstinately refuse to live--to quote
Goethe's words again--not only "in the beautiful and the good," but also
"in the whole," which is equally necessary for a well-ordered life. What
it seems to me we need is to teach the facts of life-giving, or, in
other words, of sex, as a great, wide, open-air law, running right
through animated creation, an ever-ascending progression forming a
golden ladder leading up to man.

In explaining the facts of reproduction, I would therefore suggest that
you should begin with the lowest rung of the ladder, the simplest
organisms, such as the amoeba or the volvox. I should show how these
multiply by fission, the creature dividing into two, when it is
impossible to tell which is the father and which is the mother. I would
then pass upwards to more complex organisms, where two individuals are
required to form the offspring. You could explain the whole process by
th