A coarse and ill-bred community moves in a vicious circle.

Its members are brought up to believe that sex matters are filthy, and when they become adults they protest violently against their children being taught this filthy knowledge.

The teacher's task is thus rendered at the best difficult, and under democratic conditions impossible.

We cannot, therefore, hope for any immediate introduction of sexual physiology into schools, even in the unobtrusive form in which alone it could properly be introduced, that is to say as a natural and inevitable part of general physiology.
This objection to animal physiology by no means applies, however, to botany.

There can be little doubt that botany is of all the natural sciences that which best admits of this incidental instruction in the fundamental facts of sex, when we are concerned with children below the age of puberty.