rning-point of their lives, warn you how serious is this
responsibility.

The foundation of old age, says a distinguished author, is laid in
childhood; but the health of middle-life depends upon puberty. Never was
there a truer maxim. The two years which change the girl to the woman
often seal for ever the happiness or the hopeless misery of her whole
life. They decide whether she is to become a healthy, helpful, cheerful
wife and mother, or a languid, complaining invalid, to whom marriage is
a curse, children an affliction, and life itself a burden.

We reiterate our warning: Mothers, teachers, you to whom children are
confided at this crisis of their lives, look well to it that you
appreciate, understand, and observe the duties you have assumed. Let no
false modesty prevent you from learning and enforcing those precautions,
so necessary at this period of life.

WHAT HASTENS AND WHAT RETARDS PUBERTY?

As a rule, we find that those who develope early, fade early. A short
childhood portends a premature old age. It often foreshadows, also, a
feeble middle-life.

Having ascertained, therefore, what is the average age at which puberty
takes place with us, let us see what conditions anticipate or retard
this age.

The most important is _climate._

In hot climates, man, like the vegetation, has a surprising rapidity of
growth. Marriages are usual at twelve or fourteen years of age. Puberty
comes to both sexes as early as at ten and eleven years. We even read in
the life of Mohammed, that one of his wives, when but ten years of age,
bore him a son. Let another dozen years pass, and these blooming maidens
have been metamorphosed into wrinkled, faded old women. The beauty of
their precocious youth has withered almost literally like a flower which
is plucked.

Very different is it in the cold and barren regions of the far north.
There man, once more partaking of the nature of his surroundings, yields
as slowly to the impulses of his passions as does the ice-bound earth to
the slanting rays of the summer sun. Maturity, so quick to come, so
swift to leave in the torrid heats, arrives, chilled by the long
winters, to the girls of Lapland, Norway, and Siberia, only when they
are eighteen and nineteen years of age. But, in return for this, they
retain their vigor and good looks to a green old age.

Between these extremes, including as they do the whole second decade of
existence, this important change takes place normally