_Sexual Education._
NOTE.--The paragraphs relating to Sexual Education are
designed for parents rather than for teachers, the parent
being the natural educator of the family and sexual
education relating to the preservation and continuance of
the family. This chapter is accordingly, for the most
part, omitted here. It contains judicious reflections,
invaluable to parents and guardians.--_Tr._
§ 72. Gymnastic exercises fall naturally into a systematic arrangement
determined by the chronological order of development through infancy,
childhood, and youth. Walking, running, and leaping belong, to the first
period; lifting, swinging, and throwing, to the second; swimming,
riding, and bodily contests, to the third, and these last may also be
continued into manhood. But with the arrival at youth, a new epoch makes
its appearance in the organism. It prepares itself for the propagation
of the species. It expands the individual through the need which he
feels of uniting himself with another individual of the same species,
but who is a polar opposite to him, in order to preserve the two in a
new individual. The blood rushes more vigorously; the muscular strength
becomes more easily roused into activity; an indefinable impulse, a
sweet melancholy takes possession of the being. This period demands a
special care in the educator.
§ 73. The general preventive guards must be found in a rational system
of food and exercise. By care in these directions, the development of
the bones, and with them of the brain and spinal cord at this period,
may be led to a proper strength, and that the easily-moulded material
may not be perverted from its normal functions in the development of the
body to a premature manifestation of the sexual instinct.
§ 74. Special forethought is necessary lest the brain be too early
over-strained, and lest, in consequence of such precocious and excessive
action, the foundation for a morbid excitation of the whole nervous
system be laid, which may easily lead to effeminate and voluptuous
reveries, and to brooding over obscene representations. The excessive
reading of novels, whose exciting pages delight in painting the love of
the sexes for each other and its sensual phases, may lead to this, and
then the mischief is done.