the parent body
and forms a new individual living organism, as in the case of the
polyps or the tubers in plant life.

A tree, for instance, may be grown from a graft which has been cut off
and planted in the ground. And ants and bees which have not been
fecundated are quite capable of laying eggs out of which develop
perfect, well-formed descendants. This last process is called
parthenogenesis. It is a process, however, which if carried on through
several generations, ends in deterioration and degeneracy. In the case
of the higher animals, vertebrates and man, such reproduction is an
impossibility.

These higher types of animal life have been provided by nature with
special organs of reproduction and reproductive glands whose
secretions, when they are projected from the body under certain
conditions, reproduce themselves, and increase and develop in such
wise that the living organism from which they proceed is reproduced in
practically its identical form. Thus it perpetuates the original type.
Philosophically it may be said that these cells directly continue the
life of the parents, so that death in reality only destroys a part of
the individual. Every individual lives again in his offspring.

THE TRUE MISSION OF SEX

This rebirth of the individual in his descendants represents the true
mission of sex where the human being is concerned. And reproduction,
the perpetuation of the species, underlies all rightful and normal sex
functions and activities. The actual physical process of reproduction,
the details which initiate reproduction in the case of the human
being, it seems unnecessary here to describe. In the animal world,
into which the moral equation does not really enter, the facts of
conjugation represent a simple and natural working-out of functional
bodily laws, usually with a seasonal determination. But where man is
concerned these facts are so largely made to serve the purposes of
pruriency, so exploited to inflame the imagination in an undesirable
and directly harmful way that they can be approached only with the
utmost caution.

The intimate fact knowledge necessary in this connection is of a
peculiarly personal and sacred nature, and represents information
which is better communicated by the spoken than by the printed word.
The wise father and mother are those naturally indicated to convey
this information to their sons and daughters by word of mouth. By
analogy, by fuller d