and questionings arise, which require all the tact and insight of a wise mentor to answer. Happy is the adolescent who has such a mentor, all through this period of storm and stress, in a trusted parent, or teacher, or friend. I have heard of parents who were far from this; who, in fact, either held their children at a distance in all questions touching not only religion, but sex, or else spoke without knowledge, in either case making still harder, and sometimes very bitter indeed, the inevitable struggles of this stormy stage of life. In matters of sex, thousands of young people on this continent turn from their natural advisers, so oblivious to the condition of their youthful minds, and address themselves to designing quacks. These nurse and prey upon their fears, fears which are generally based upon perfectly normal phenomena. Not content with this, these quacks actually sell these confidential letters at so much a thousand. While I was at Clark University, one of my fellow-students proved this by buying from a dealer several hundred of these letters. A frank statement of physiological facts by a wise and tactful friend in whom they had confidence would have saved every one of them much misery.
Adolescence is the plastic period par excellence, the period of the educator's opportunity. To the extent that the youth's and maiden's instincts and interests differ, to that extent should their education also differ. Training for wifehood, for parenthood, for home, and for social duties, should surely be central in the education of young women; training for manhood and the service of man in the education of young men. Later adolescence is pre-eminently a period of specialization and efforts at mastery. It is at this time that the youth should devote himself to the cultivation of his special talent. While musical talent is usually displayed earlier, and the talent of the writer and the inventor later, it is at seventeen or eighteen, on the average, that artists and poets first show unmistakable talent, that actors achieve their first great success, that scientists begin to feel a warm interest in science, and that noted pioneers leave their homes. To deal with this period of later adolescence the very highest ability is required in the educator. Of the three forces of which every man is a resultant, heredity, environment, and variation, variation now predominates. It is out of adolescence that the present period of civilization and Christianity has grown, and it is out of adolescence that a nobler future is being slowly but surely evolved.
