8o TABOO AND GENETICS 



use of the social as distinguished from the 

 biological capacities of the race. They affect 

 the sex problem proper, which applies to a 

 younger age-class, only through their opinions. 

 Some of these opinions are hangovers from 

 the time in their own lives when they had 

 stronger sexual interests, and some are peculiar 

 to people of their readjusted glandular activity. 

 Their reproductive contribution to societj^ has 

 been made. 



Pre-pubertal childhood and youth, on the 

 contrary, has its biological contributions to 

 society still before it. The glandular activity 

 of boys and girls is perhaps not so unlike as 

 to justif}^ society in giving them a different 

 kind of education and preparation for group 

 life. The excuse for two sorts of training is 

 that the two sexes will not do the same work 

 after puberty. Hence the question of youthful 

 training is sociological almost entirely — not 

 biological — or rather, it rests upon the biology, 

 not of childhood but of the reproductive period, 

 which society anticipates. 



Instead of scattering attention over the whole 

 history of the universe, then, or even over the 

 general held of biology, in dealing with sex as 

 a social problem, the emphasis must be upon 

 the human life cycle during the functional- 

 reproductive period. Other biological data than 

 that which concerns this period is merely intro- 



