It is impossible to overrate the wide importance of this law of self-adjustment, under which human function is carried on. The abuses of sex and the misunderstanding of actual facts, which have led to widespread error on this subject, will be dwelt on later. Every parent, however, who has been able to fulfil the true parental relationship to the child will realize the beneficence of this law. The obligatory and premature marriage of daughters, so largely the custom abroad, is one result of error on this subject. A still more dangerous error is the cruel advice sometimes given to a young man to degrade a woman, and sin against his own higher nature by taking a mistress or resorting to harlots. I have often been consulted by anxious mothers who have observed or been told by their boys of fourteen or fifteen that an unusual discharge had taken place. It is of vital importance to the parent to know that such action is as natural and healthy in the growing lad as in the growing girl, but that in both it is a time requiring guidance, both moral and physical. Respectful, earnest words of hygienic counsel, including mind and body, are indispensable at this critical time of youth. Parents, particularly mothers, live too often in fatal ignorance of the conditions of sexual health and disease in their children. My advice is constantly asked in such cases as the following: A careful mother, who had brought up her son, a strong and healthy young man, to the age of twenty, learned from him of this natural sign of vitality, which both supposed to indicate disease! It was with pain and dismay that she replied to his confidence, ‘Alas! then, my son, I fear you must consult a doctor.’ The joyful light of gratitude and renewed hope with which she learned the truth on this important subject--viz., that the occasional spontaneous action of the organs (not voluntarily forced by corrupt thought and action) is natural and beneficial--will not be easily forgotten. It was like the gleam of transcendent joy which I have seen illuminate the face of a young mother at the shrill cry of her first-born infant. The measureless evil caused, not only by their ignorance, but by the false information given to mothers, is illustrated by the inquiry made of a friend of mine, a clergyman, by an intelligent French mother about to move to Paris with her son. This lady, sensible and even pious, wrote to the clergyman to inquire ‘if providing a mistress for her son would be very costly in Paris.’ She had accepted as a fact what she had been taught, viz., that no young man who could not marry early could remain healthy without resorting to vice.