Unfortunately, however, there is more often blind repression than rational control. The measures taken to prevent a girl's becoming a tom-boy are measures of sex-repression quite as much as of sex-differentiation. Over-reaction of sensitive little souls to lessons in modesty often causes distortion of normal sex-development. Ignorance concerning the phenomena of life is commended as innocence, while it really implies a sex-curiosity which has been too severely repressed. The young woman blushes at thoughts of love, while the young man is filled with a sense of dignity. We smile at the picture of "Miss Philura's" confusion as she hesitatingly sends up to her Creator a petition for the much-desired boon of a husband. But really, why shouldn't she want one? Many a young woman, in order to deaden her senses to the unsuspected lure of the reproductive instinct by what is really an awkward attempt at _sublimation_, makes a fetish of dress and social position and considers only the marriage of convenience; or, on the other hand, she scorns men altogether and throws herself into a "career." Young men are not so often taught to repress, but neither are they taught to swing their vital energies into altruistic channels through sublimation. Since the woman of his class will not marry him until he has money, the young man too often satisfies his undirected instincts in a commercial way. The statistics of venereal diseases prove that here, as elsewhere, goods subject to barter are subject to contamination. In a late marriage, too often a contaminated body accompanies the material possessions which the standards of society have demanded of a husband. But the woman pays in still other coin for the repressions arising from faulty childhood training. Unable to find expression for herself either in marriage or in devotion to work, because some old childish repression is still denying all outlet to her legitimate desire, she frequently falls into a neurosis; or if she escapes a real breakdown, she gives expression to unsatisfied longings in some isolated nervous symptoms which in many cases center about the organs of generation. There then results any one of the various functional disturbances which are only too often mistaken for organic disease. What is needed in cases like this is not a gynecologist nor a surgeon, but a psycho-pathologist--or perhaps only a grasp of the facts. Let us look at the more common of these disturbances in order to gain an understanding of the situation. THE MENSTRUAL PERIOD