girl because she needs more attention than
the boy. Growth is a very expensive process. It begins in the bone. When
the bones lengthen out, then every muscle, every nerve has to be lengthened
out to suit that extra length, and that means a great deal of waste for
that rebuilding, but it is something worse than that. You know perfectly
well that out of the butterfly egg there comes the caterpillar, and that
caterpillar goes into a cocoon, and during the life of the cocoon every
organ is changed there and it comes out a butterfly. That is what we call a
metamorphosis.

The girl between ten and sixteen is undergoing a metamorphosis just as sure
as that caterpillar is undergoing a metamorphosis. If you leave town for a
few years and come back, you know all the old men and women haven't changed
any, except to die off. The babies have grown some; but the boy and the
girl seem to be grown all over again. That is, the girl whom you left at
nine years old and on coming back find her sixteen, has dropped down her
skirts, has drawn up her hair, and that is the butterfly cocoon, and it is
a mighty pretty butterfly cocoon. That is waste again. It is waste, waste,
on all sides and all of that waste is going into the blood, no other place
to put it; it ought to be got out at once. But there is another thing
about it; all the food must be digested, and so oxygen must be gained and
waste must be eliminated. All the organs in the trunk between those ages of
ten and fourteen are relatively both larger and smaller in girls than at
any other period of life.

It looks as though Nature was making a bad blunder, but she is really
making the best of a very bad bargain, doing the best she can under hard
circumstances. With these small vital organs and this tremendous draught on
the body for new material and the large amount of waste to be eliminated,
you are sure to have trouble. That trouble is going to manifest itself
first of all in the blood. The blood is going to be poor blood during those
years, unless you remedy it. Poor blood, first of all, depresses the
nervous system, and the girl feels gloomy and good for nothing; she hates
to go out into the cold air because she chills; yet that cold air is what
she needs more than anything else in the world. She hates to make an effort
and won't take the exercise she needs if she can possibly help it. The
exercise she must have. Her appetite has gone all wrong. She likes to live
on caramels, pickles