intensely pernicious. I have already, in the chapter on Pathology, remarked on the mischief which is often done by the anxiety of religious parents to make their children (usually somewhere about this perilous time of puberty) experience the emotional struggle which is believed to end in a change of heart and principles. I need, therefore, only now repeat the expression of my intense conviction that the results of this process, as seen by the physician to occur within that mental region where the emotions and the organic nervous system come into closest relations, are simply disastrous. It is not my business to suggest the proper alternative to a mode of spiritual training which I think deleterious; I can only intimate, in the most general way, my belief that a calm and systematic training in the simplest principles of duty and religion is greatly more suitable to the immature mind and brain of youth than any strong emotional excitement on such topics. But if ill-regulated spiritual emotion of a religious kind be a dangerous thing for young persons in the most serious crisis of bodily development, far more decidedly pernicious is the spurious excitement of feeling which is directed to lower and often most unworthy objects. The increasing precocity of boys and girls, in their familiarity with the most objectionable aspects of passion and intrigue, is steadily fed, in the present day, by a system that allows them, too often, unlimited access to light literature which (as is strikingly the case with many novels of our day) is at once devoid of true literary and artistic merit and at the same time replete with sensational incident of a vulgarly exciting kind. The same degrading tendency is very distinctly to be noted in the character of the dramatic and other public exhibitions which are most popular at the present day; the main characteristics being, bad art, and thinly-veiled sensuality, all the more pernicious for being veiled at all. It would be a hundred times better that a boy, or even a girl, should study the frank and outspoken descriptions to be found in Shakespeare or Fielding, with all their occasional coarseness, than that they should enervate their minds with the sickly trash that is most current and most popular at the present day, in theatre and circulating library.