I have known young ladies to be guilty of the almost incredible crime of trying to arrest the flow by plugging up the vagina and by resorting to other means, that they might attend a dancing party or some pleasure excursion. Such a procedure is sure to be followed by the direst retribution to the offender. Nature never allows her laws to be so trifled with. Some experience a deep mortification on account of this function; some think it a very great inconvenience and a nuisance--an obstacle to their pleasure; others feel unhappy and vexed about it. In truth, every woman should consider it a privilege and should regard menstruation as it really is, a blessing from heaven; and, when rightly performed, a help to lend loveliness to her character, beauty to her expression, music to her voice, and gracefulness to her form and movements. Mothers or guardians should instruct young girls in good time as to the expected menstrual function and prepare their minds for its advent. They should also be carefully instructed in regard to the external use of water--of its attendant danger, lest they chill themselves sufficiently to arrest this flow, which should continue uninterruptedly until the function is complete. Too many lives have been sacrificed by suppressing the monthly flux; external ablutions should be plentiful, but only sufficient, as in the case of boys, for cleanliness. If menstruation should not become healthfully established at the proper time of age, consult a judicious physician who will see that any abnormal condition, preventing such consummation, is properly removed. "The principal organs of elimination, common to both sexes, are the bowels, kidneys, lungs and skin. A neglect of their functions is punished in each alike. To woman is intrusted the exclusive management of another process of elimination, viz.: the catamenial function. This, using the blood for its channel of operation, performs, like the blood, double duty. It is necessary to ovulation, and to the integrity of every part of the reproductive apparatus; it also serves as a means of elimination for the blood itself. A careless management of this function, at any period of life during its existence, is apt to be followed by consequences that may be serious; but a neglect of it during the epoch of development, that is, from the age of fourteen to eighteen or twenty, not only produces great evil at the time of the neglect, but leaves a large legacy of evil to the future. The system is then peculiarly susceptible; and disturbances of the delicate mechanism we are considering, induced during the catamenial weeks of that critical age by constrained positions, muscular effort, brain work, and all forms of mental and physical excitement, germinate a host of ills."[H] [H] Clarke: "Sex in Education."