The problem of control of the insistent passions of normal young men has been unscientifically minimized by numerous writers and lecturers. It should be noted that many of these are men who have long since forgotten the storms and stresses of their early manhood, and others are women who do not know the facts indicating that the sexual instincts young men are characteristically active, aggressive, spontaneous, and automatic, while those of women _as a rule_ are passive and subject to awakening by external stimuli, especially in connection with affection. Such forgetful men and uninformed women are prone to regard the lack of control of many young men as simply due to "original sin," "innate viciousness," "bad companions," or "irresistible temptations"; and they overlook the great fact that maintaining perfect sexual control in his pre-marital years is for the average healthy young man a problem compared with which all others, including the alcoholic temptation, are of little significance. Such being the truth about young men, nothing is to be gained and much is to be lost if older people fail to take an understanding and sympathetic attitude. I question whether any young man has ever been helped through his adolescent crises by such oft-repeated assertions as that "there is no more reason that a young man should go astray than that his sister should," or, in other words, that "continence is as easy for a young man as for a girl of similar age." An observing young man will doubt such statements, and if he has had access to scientific information, he will feel sure that there has been an attempt to influence him by the kind of exaggeration commonly adopted by specialists in moral preachments. The plain truth is that there is a physiological "reason" or explanation, although not a justification for failure of self-control. Even if we accept the improbable statement of some writers that boys and girls are in early adolescence potentially equal in sexual instincts and assuming that they may be protected equally against vicious habits, we must not forget that every normal boy passes in early puberty through peculiar physiological changes that arouse his deepest instincts. I refer especially to the frequent occurrence of involuntary sexual tumescence and to the occasional nocturnal emissions, which processes leave the boy in no doubt whatever as to the nature, source, and desirability of sexual pleasure. Especially is this true of the automatic emissions that usually follow continence of healthy young men, for in connection with such relief of seminal pressure every nerve center of the sexual mechanism seems to be involved in the culminating nerve storm of which the awakening individual is often quite pleasurably conscious. In short, as men looking backward to their early manhood well understand, the physical sensations that come into the normal sexual experience of the adolescent boy are different only in degree of intensity from those