, the stooping gait, the desertion of social games, the
solitary walk, late rising, livid and sunken eye, and many other symptoms,
will fix the attention of every intelligent and competent guardian of youth
that something is wrong.

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MARRIED PEOPLE.

Nor are many persons sufficiently aware of the ruinous extent to which the
amative propensity is indulged by married persons. The matrimonial ceremony
does, indeed, sanctify the act of sexual intercourse, but it can by no
means atone for nor obviate the consequences of its abuse. Excessive
indulgence in the married relation is, perhaps, as much owing to the force
of habit, as to the force of the sexual appetite.

[Illustration: GUARD WELL THE CRADLE.

EDUCATION CANNOT BEGIN TOO YOUNG.]

EXTREME YOUTH.

More lamentable still is the effect of inordinate sexual excitement of the
young and unmarried. It is not very uncommon to find a confirmed onanist,
or, rather, masturbator, who has not yet arrived at the period of puberty.
Many cases are related in which young boys and girls, from eight to ten
years of age, were taught the method of self-pollution by their older
playmates, and had made serious encroachments on the fund of constitutional
vitality even before any considerable degree of sexual appetite was
developed.

FORCE OF HABIT.

Here, again, the fault was not in the power of passion, but in the force of
habit. Parents and guardians of youth can not be too mindful of the
character and habits of those with whom they allow young persons and
children under their charge to associate intimately, and especially careful
should they be with whom they allow them to sleep.

SIN OF IGNORANCE.

It is customary to designate self-pollution as among the "vices." I think
misfortune is the more appropriate term. It is true, that in the
physiological sense, it is one of the very worst "transgressions of the
law." But in the moral sense it is generally the sin of ignorance in the
commencement, and in the end the passive submission to a morbid and almost
resistless impulse.

QUACKS.

The time has come when the rising generation must be thoroughly instructed
in this matter. That quack specific "ignorance" has been experimented with
quite too long already. The true method of insuring all persons, young or
old, against the abuses of any part, organ, function, or faculty of the
wondrous machinery of life, is to teach them its use. "Train a child in the
way it should go" or