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morrow is being builded today. But how can the nation have 

 well rounded and stalwart thinkers in its tomorrow if the edu- 

 cators are given the children (the raw jnaterial), and then imme- 

 diately handicapped not only as to tools but as to methods of 

 development? The men and women who were pupils in such a 

 system, will some day declare the bitterness of such injustice. 



Of the many contributions which elementary botany and 

 biology jnake for ad\-anced courses in the school and for later life, 

 I wish to refer briefly to five. 



In the first place, the subject of human reproduction is 

 intimately associated with the highest hopes of humanity, and 

 yet is connected with some of the most sordid problems of the 

 race. The very insistence of the sex problem compels a genuine 

 answer from the schools. That answer must be sound, thorough 

 and immediate. Let me quote a line from a letter just received 

 from a Y. M. C. A. worker in France. " It is our former American 

 interpretation of those two terms [morale and morality] that 

 disturbs me in trying to consider what America will feel toward 

 and do for her men who are soon to return to her. Is she going 

 to continue to say that there is no sex problem in life, or is she 

 going to face it squarely and try to solve it?" Those who have 

 studied the problem of presenting sex matters to children and 

 have taught biology, know that to avoid the pitfalls there must 

 be a natural and unforced approach. There is absolutely no 

 substitute for the normal, logical procedure of our elementary 

 biology courses, dealing first with fertilization in the flowering 

 plants, then in a typical animal like the fish or the frog. Neither 

 of these topics when presented is tied up with sex-hygiene, there 

 is no self-consciousness, and there is built up a natural foundation 

 for all later applications, whether of sex-hygiene of one sort or 

 another, or the justifiable expectations of the instructor in 

 advanced botany or zoology. 



In the second place, the stress given to hygiene, now con- 

 tinued throughout the entire high school course, might lead some 

 to a presumption that elementary biology could fairly be dis- 

 pensed with, in \'iew of the probable(?) duplication of subject 

 matter and treatment. However, the situation is far from being 



