f young women may
be due to a storing up of iron in the system, and is so far
normal, being a preparation for the function of reproduction.
Some observations of Bunge's seem to throw much light on the real
cause of what may be termed physiological chlorosis. He found by
a series of experiments on animals of different ages that young
animals contain a much greater amount of iron in their tissues
than adult animals; that, for instance, the body of a rabbit an
hour after birth contains more than four times as much iron as
that of a rabbit two and a half months old. It thus appears
probable that at the period of puberty, and later, there is a
storage of iron in the system preparatory to the exercise of the
maternal functions. It is precisely between the ages of fifteen
and twenty-three, as Stockman found by an analysis of his own
cases (_British Medical Journal_, December 14, 1895), that the
majority of cases occur; there was, indeed, he found, no case in
which the first onset was later than the age of twenty-three. A
similar result is revealed by the charts of Lloyd Jones, which
cover a vastly greater number of cases.

We owe to Lloyd Jones an important contribution to the knowledge
of chlorosis in its physiological or normal relationships. He has
shown that chlorosis is but the exaggeration of a condition that
is normal at puberty (and, in many women, at each menstrual
period), and which, there is good reason to believe, even has a
favorable influence on fertility. He found that
light-complexioned persons are more fertile than the
dark-complexioned, and that at the same time the blood of the
latter is of less specific gravity, containing less haemoglobin.
Lloyd Jones also reached the generalization that girls who have
had chlorosis are often remarkably pretty, so that the tendency
to chlorosis is associated with all the sexual and reproductive
aptitudes that make a woman attractive to a man. His conclusion
is that the normal condition of which chlorosis is the extreme
and pathological condition, is a preparation for motherhood (E.
Lloyd Jones, "Chlorosis: The Special Anaemia of Young Women,"
1897; also numerous reports to the British Medical Association,
published in the _British Medical Journal_. There was an
interesting discussion of the theories of chlorosis at the Moscow