Likewise, Nature expresses the intention of reproduction by giving to plants and animals distinctive organs for this purpose. These are endowed with exquisite sensibility, so that their proper exercise produces enjoyment beneficial to both. Excessive sexual indulgence not only prostrates the nervous system, enfeebles the body, and drains the blood of its vivifying elements, but is inconsistent with intellectual activity, morality, and spiritual development. The most entrancing delights and consummate enjoyments are of the emotive order, ideal, abstract, and pure, so inspiring that they overpower the grosser sensual pleasures and diffuse their own sweet chastity and refining influence over all the processes of life. Hence, the gratification of the sexual instincts should always be moderate. It should be regulated by the judgment and will, and kept within the bounds of health. No person has a moral right to carry this indulgence so far as to produce injurious consequences to either party, and he who cannot refrain from it is in no proper condition to propagate his species. In all culture there must be self-control, and the practice of self-denial at the command of love and justice is always a virtue. Self-government is the polity of our people, and we point with pride and laudable exultation to our political maxims, laws, and free institutions. The family is the prototype of society. If self-restraint be practiced in the marital relation, then the principle of self-control will carry health, strength, and morality into all parts of the commonwealth. The leading characteristics of any nation are but the reflection of the traits of its individual members, and thus the family truly typifies the practical morality and enduring character of a people. OVULATION. The _Ovaries_ are those essential parts of the generative system of the human female in which the ova are matured. There are two ovaries, one on each side of the uterus, and connected with it by the Fallopian tubes; they are ovoidal bodies about an inch in diameter, and furnish the _germs_ or ovules. These latter are very minute, seldom measuring 1/120 of an inch in diameter, and frequently are not more than half that size. The ovaries develop with the growth of the female, so that, finally, at the pubescent period, they ripen and liberate an ovum, or germ vesicle, which is carried into the uterine cavity through the Fallopian tubes. With the aid of the microscope, we find that these ova are composed of granular substance, in which is found a miniature yolk surrounded by a transparent membrane, called the _zona pellucida_. This yolk contains a germinal vesicle in which can be discovered a nucleus, called the _germinal spot_. The process of the growth of the ovaries is very gradual, and their function of ripening and discharging an ovum every month into the Fallopian tubes and uterus is not developed until between the twelfth and fifteenth years.