As Canon Lyttelton remarks, in urging that the laws of the transmission of life should be taught to children by the mother: "The way they receive it with native reverence, truthfulness of understanding and guileless delicacy, is nothing short of a revelation of the never-ceasing beauty of nature.

People sometimes speak of the indescribable beauty of children's innocence.

But I venture to say that no one quite knows what it is who has foregone the privilege of being the first to set before them the true meaning of life and birth and the mystery of their own being.

Not only do we fail to build up sound knowledge in them, but we put away from ourselves the chance of learning something that must be divine." In the same way, Edward Carpenter, stating that it is easy and natural for the child to learn from the first its physical relation to its mother, remarks (_Love's Coming of Age_, p.

9): "A child at the age of puberty, with the unfolding of its far-down emotional and sexual nature, is eminently capable of the most sensitive, affectional and serene appreciation of what _sex_ means (generally more so as things are to-day, than its worldling parent or guardian); and can absorb the teaching, if sympathetically given, without any shock or disturbance to its sense of shame--that sense which is so natural and valuable a safeguard of early youth." How widespread, even some years ago, had become the conviction that the sexual facts of life should be taught to girls as well as boys, was shown when the opinions of a very miscellaneous assortment of more or less prominent persons were sought on the question ("The Tree of Knowledge," _New Review_, June, 1894).