asked her where children came
from, shows how she began with telling him about flowers, to pass
on to fish and birds, and finally to the facts of human
pregnancy, showing him pictures from an obstetrical manual of the
child in its mother's body. It may be added that the advisability
of beginning the sex teaching of children with the facts of
botany was repeatedly emphasized by various speakers at the
special meeting of the German Congress for Combating Venereal
Disease devoted to the subject of sexual instruction
(_Sexualpaedagogik_, especially pp. 36, 47, 76).

The transition from botany to the elementary zooelogy of the lower animals,
to human anatomy and physiology, and to the science of anthropology based
on these, is simple and natural. It is not likely to be taken in detail
until the age of puberty. Sex enters into all these subjects and should
not be artificially excluded from them in the education of either boys or
girls. The text-books from which the sexual system is entirely omitted
ought no longer to be tolerated. The nature and secretion of the
testicles, the meaning of the ovaries and of menstruation, as well as the
significance of metabolism and the urinary excretion, should be clear in
their main lines to all boys and girls who have reached the age of
puberty.

At puberty there arises a new and powerful reason why boys and girls
should receive definite instruction in matters of sex. Before that age it
is possible for the foolish parent to imagine that a child may be
preserved in ignorant innocence.[25] At puberty that belief is obviously
no longer possible. The efflorescence of puberty with the development of
the sexual organs, the appearance of hair in unfamiliar places, the
general related organic changes, the spontaneous and perhaps alarming
occurrence in boys of seminal emissions, and in girls of menstruation, the
unaccustomed and sometimes acute recognition of sexual desire accompanied
by new sensations in the sexual organs and leading perhaps to
masturbation; all these arouse, as we cannot fail to realize, a new
anxiety in the boy's or girl's mind, and a new curiosity, all the more
acute in many cases because it is carefully concealed as too private, and
even too shameful, to speak of to anyone. In boys, especially if of
sensitive temperament, the suffering thus caused may be keen and
prolonged.

A doctor of philosophy, prominent in his profession, wrote t