l physiology?"

"You have given me a good many questions to answer, little girl, and I
hardly know where to begin answering them.

"In your school physiology you studied all about the organs that keep
you alive. What did you learn about your bodily house? How many stories
is it?"

"Three stories high, and then there is a cupola on the top of all. I
like to think of the head as a cupola or observatory, resting on the
tower of the neck and turning from side to side as we want to look
around us."

"And what is the furniture in the different stories?"

"O, the upper story is called the thorax, and the one big room in it is
the thoracic cavity. It contains the heart and lungs. The next story
below is the abdominal cavity and it has a number of articles of
furniture, the liver, the stomach, the spleen, the bowels, etc. Then the
lower story is--O, I've forgotten what it is called."

"The lower story is called the pelvis."

"O, yes, and the pelvic cavity contains the reservoirs for waste
material. I remember you told me that once."

"That is right. The pelvic cavity contains the bladder, which is the
reservoir for waste fluid, and the rectum, the outlet for waste solids.
But it contains more than these. It is here in the pelvis that these
organs of which you have not heard are located. You remember when you
asked me about yourself and how you came into the world I told you of a
little room in mother's body where you lived and grew until you were
large enough to live your own independent existence. Did you ever wonder
where this room is?"

"Why, I never thought much about it. I guess I just thought it was in
the abdominal cavity. Isn't it?"

[Illustration]

"No, the room is a little sac that lies here in the pelvis. I can best
explain it to you by a picture. Here it is. You see it looks like a
pear hanging with the small end down. It lies just between the bladder
and the rectum, and a passage leads up to it."

"O, I see. Doesn't the bladder empty itself through that passage?"

"No, the outlet to the bladder is just at the very entrance to this
passage, but does not open into the passage at all. This passage is
called the vagina, and the little room has two names. One is Latin,
uterus; the other is Saxon, womb--it means the place where things are
brought to life. The Latin word is used by scientists, but the Saxon
word is used in the Bible and by poets. Do you remember when Nicodemus
came to Jesus that he was tol