It has seemed to me that, in both sexes, the first seven years of life--during which native faculty and attribute are evolving at great pace--are a phase in which the Recessive, or anabolic, mode, conservative of the resources and vitalising of the tissues, is in the ascendant. The true child of both sexes is normally, during these years, a typification of the Woman-traits; receptive, plastic, gentle, affectionate, trustful, intuitive, emotional; quickly fatigued, quickly recuperative; more or less lovely and angelic. In this phase, native intuitive faculty makes children sometimes phenomenal; lightning calculators, musical prodigies, precocious poets, artists. So too, their marvellously rapid apprehension of the complex meanings and implications of life betokens Supra-conscious mentality. At seven years old and thence onward to fourteen, a male, and katabolic, phase sets in. Phenomenal faculty vanishes. Concrete development of body, brain and energy proceeds apace. The child becomes active, intelligent, enterprising, inquiring. The boy becomes appreciably male; the girl more or less of a hoyden, more male, indeed, than she is normally at any other period of her existence. Unless, that is, this hoyden phase is rendered permanent in her by masculine training. At fourteen, with the evolution of sex, the sex of boy and girl, with its respective opposite modes of constitution and of function, makes for marked development, each along its characteristic lines. III The French have a saying: _La femme est une malade_. Woman is not, of course, an invalid. Nature does not fashion invalids. Woman's organisation is normally delicate and sensitive and highly strung, because of its special and complex sex-differentiation. She resembles the child, in that howsoever healthful (in proportion, indeed, as she is normal and healthfully organised) her cells of brain and body re-act resiliently and vitally to all the agencies, physical and psychical, about her. This sensitive re-activity is not only a sign, it is, as well, a _source_ of health. Because the greater delicacy and sensitiveness of organisation which characterise women and children, resulting in their quick re-activity to deleterious conditions, secure a permanently more highly-vitalised condition of body than is the case with man, whose cells are less sensitive, more tolerant of fatigue, of cold, and of other injurious agents. Immunity against injurious factors is the parent of degeneracy. Life being re-activity, in terms of living processes, to the factors of environment, such immunity entails loss of vital re-activity to _vivifying_ as much as against deteriorative factors.