And it's the sea air of a healthy knowledge and acceptance of these matters that we ought to be pumping through our schoolrooms, our dormitories, and our heart-to-heart talks with our children. Approach them frankly enough, and with no semblance of shamefacedness, and we needn't be afraid, I think, of any evil consequences. The guilty smile, the illicit joke, become disarmed in advance when their subject is treated in the same matter-of-fact and unmysterious fashion as those of geography or astronomy. And that is why, on the whole, I am opposed to the average "purity" volumes that are published for purposes of sexual instruction. For though they acknowledge this to be the solution of a large portion of the problem, they are so written, circulated, and advertised as to suggest rather an initiation into the unspeakable than a straightforward piece of natural history. And I suspect, as a consequence, that their sales are considerably larger among the prurient than the pious. An older generation was brought up on "Reading without tears." The next should have a companion volume "Biology without shame." Forgive this sermon, but I have been confronted just lately with such a lot of human mental wreckage, the direct result, in my opinion, of the half-religious, half-fearful shrouds with which we always swaddle up these questions, that I rejoice in an opportunity for their wholesale condemnation. It was Mrs. Craigie, I think, who said that every girl of eighteen should read "Tom Jones." And one can see why, for it is a clean and wholesome history, if a little unspiritual. But her education, like her brother's, should not be left haphazard to the chance reading of a novel, or to the unnecessary blushes with which she ponders certain passages of Scripture. Well, good-bye, old man, and God bless you. Chat it all over with the young sinners, and then work out a little course of lectures upon the reproduction of species. If you have never talked collectively to a roomful of boys upon the subject before, you will be surprised at the rapt interest and genuine solemnity with which they will attend to what you have to tell them. And the purity of your school won't suffer, I think, by its change of foundations. Your affect. cousin, PETER HARDING. XI _To Miss Josephine Summers, The Cottage, Potham, Beds._ 91B HARLEY STREET, W., _April_ 22, 1910. MY DEAR AUNT JOSEPHINE,