More clearly, perhaps, than any of those occurring at the other crises of our lives, these solemnities are pervaded by common characteristics. Primitive man in Australia, in America, and in Africa, marks the advent of puberty in a manner which is essentially the same. When we rise to the higher class of religions, we find ceremonies of a different kind from which the ruder symbolism of the savage creeds is absent. But from the uniformity of the types of initiation into manhood among uncivilized people, it is highly probable that the progenitors of the Aryan and Semitic races also, at some period of their history, employed similar methods of rendering this epoch in life impressive and remarkable. Two distinguishing features characterize the rites of puberty—cruelty and mystery. There is always some painful ordeal to be undergone by the young men or boys who have attained the requisite age; and this ordeal is to be passed through in extreme secrecy as regards the opposite sex, and with a ceremonial of an unknown character, which is hidden from all but the initiated performers. Sometimes the puberty of women is also sanctified by religious ceremonies, and these follow the same rules, except that the female sex are not required to undergo such severe suffering as is often inflicted upon men. While, however, the cruelty is less, the mystery is the same. Men are not admitted to witness the performances gone through, and these are conducted in secluded places to which no access is allowed. The meaning of these two features of the rites of puberty is not difficult to divine. Young men enter at that age on a period of their lives in which they are expected to display courage in danger and firmness under pain. Hence the infliction of some kind of suffering is an appropriate symbolical preparation for their future careers. Moreover, the manner in which they endure their agony serves as a test of their fortitude, and may influence the position to be assigned to them in the warlike expeditions of the tribe. But the primary motive, no doubt, is the apparent fitness of the infliction of pain at an age when the necessary pains of manhood are about to begin.