ubject for class
study. The task requires that parents should be upon very 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 fro