44

SEX IN EDUCATION.

bad assimilation infects the whole economy. Brain and thought are enfeebled, because the stomach and liver are in error. If the ner­vous system is abnormally developed, every organ feels the twist in the nerves. The bal­ance and co-ordination of movement and function are destroyed, and the ill percolates into an unhappy posterity. If the repro­ductive system is aborted, there may be no future generations to pay the penalty of the abortion, but what is left of the organism suffers sadly. When this sort of arrest of development occurs in a man, it takes the element of masculineness out of him, and re­places it with adipose effeminacy. When it occurs in a woman, it not only substitutes in her case a wiry and perhaps thin bearded masculineness for distinctive feminine traits and power, making her an epicene, but it en­tails a variety of prolonged weaknesses, that dwarf her rightful power in almost every direction. The persistent neglect and ignor­ing by women, and especially by girls, igno­rantly more than wilfully, of that part of