I incline to think that many children would be better and not worse for reading, provided it can be done in tender years, stories like those of Captain Kidd, Jack Sheppard, Dick Tur- pin, and other gory tales, and perhaps later tales like Eugene Aram, the ophidian medicated novel, Elsie Venner, etc., on the principle of the Aristotelian catharsis to arouse betimes the higher faculties which develop later, and whose function it is to deplete the bad centers and suppress or inhibit their activity. Again, I believe that judicious and incisive scolding is a moral tonic, which is often greatly needed, and if rightly administered would be extremely effective, because it shows the instinctive reaction of the sane conscience against evil deeds and tenden- cies. Special pedagogic attention should be given to the senti- ment of justice, which is almost the beginning of personal morals in boys, and plays should be chosen and encouraged that hold the beam even, regardless of personal wish and interest. Further yet benevolence and its underlying impulse to do more than justice to our associates; to do good in the world; to give pleasure to those about, and not pain, can be directly cul- tivated. Truth-telling presents a far harder problem, as we have seen. It is no pedagogical triumph to clip the wings of fancy, but effort should be directed almost solely against the cowardly lies, which cover evil, and the heroism of telling the truth and taking the consequences is another of the elements of the moral sense, so complex, so late, and so often permanently crippled. The money sense by all the many means now used ^ HolzendorflF: Psychologic des Mordes.
JUVENILE FAULTS, IMMORALITIES, AND CRIMES 4o9 for its development in school is the surest safeguard against the most common juvenile crime of theft, and much can be taught by precept, example, and moral regimen of the sacredness of property rights. The regularity of school work and its in- dustry is a valuable moralizing agent, but entirely inadequate and insufficient by itself. Educators must face the fact that the ultimate verdict concerning the utility of the school will be de- termined, as Talleck well says, by its moral efficiency in saving children from personal vice and crime.
Wherever any source of pollution of school communities occurs, it must be at once and effectively detected, and some artificial elements must be introduced into the environment. In other words, there must be a system of moral orthopedics. Garofalo's ^ new term and principle of " temibility " is perhaps of great service. He would thus designate the quantum of evil feared that is sufficient to restrain criminal impulsion. We can not measure guilt or culpability, which may be of all degrees from nothing to infinity perhaps, but we can to some extent scale the effectiveness of restraint, if criminal impulse is not absolutely irresistible. Pain then must be so organized as to follow and measure the offense by as nearly a natural method as possible, while on the other hand the rewards for good con- duct must also be more or less accentuated. Thus the problem of criminology for youth can not be based on the principles now recognized for adults. They can not be protective of society only, but must have marked reformatory elements. Solitude ^ which tends to make weak, agitated, and fearful, at this very gregarious age should be enforced with very great discretion. There must be no personal and unmotivated clemency or par- don in such a scheme, for, according to the old saw, if mercy pardon those who kill, it becomes a murderer; nor on the other hand should there be the excessive disregard of personal adjust- ments, and the uniformitarian, who perhaps celebrated his highest triumph in the old sentence, " kill all offenders and sus- pects for God will know his own," should have no part nor lot here. The philosopher Hartmann has a suggestive article ad- vocating that penal colonies made up of transported criminals ' See its psychology and dangers well pointed out by M. H. Small: Psychical Relations of Society and Solitude. Ped. Sem., April, 1900, vol, vii, pp. 13-69.
410 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE should be experimented on by statesmen in order to put various theories of self-government to a practical test. However this may be, the penologist of youth must face some such problem in the organization of the house of detention, boys' club, farm, reformatory, etc. We must pass beyond the clumsy apparatus of a term sentence or the devices of a jury, clumsier yet, for this purpose; we must admit the principle of regret, fear, penance, material restoration of damage, and understand the sense in which, for both society and for the individual, it makes no prac- tical difference whether experts think there is some taint of in- sanity, provided only that irresponsibility is fiot hopelessly complete.
In few aspects of this theme do conceptions of and practises in regard to adolescence need more radical reconstruction. A mere accident of circumstance often condemns to criminal ca- reers youths capable of the highest service to society, and for a mere brief season of temperamental outbreak or obstreperous- ness exposes them to all the infamy to which ignorant and cruel public opinion condemns all those who have once been detected on the wrong side of the invisible and arbitrary line of recti- tude. The heart of criminal psychology is here, and not only that, but I would conclude with a most earnest personal protest against the current methods of teaching and studying ethics m our academic institutions as a speculative, historical, and ab- stract thing. Here in the concrete and saliently objective facts of crime it should have its beginning, and have more blood and body in it by getting again close to the hot battle line be- tween vice and virtue, and then only when balanced and sani- fied by a rich ballast of facts can it with advantage slowly work its way over to the larger and higher philosophy of conduct, which, when developed from this basis, will be a radically different thing from the shadowy, fantom, shablone speculations of many contemporary moralists, taught in our schools and colleges.
CHAPTER VI SEXUAL development: its dangers and hygiene in boys The bio-psychology of sexuality — Variability of parts — Pubertal changes in hair — Sexual elements — Mammae — Uterus — Ovaries — Testes — Other parts — Castra- tion and its moral and physical effects — Its justification — Self-abuse: its prevalence, its causes, and its mental and physical effects — The problem of masturbatic insanity — Sexual tension — The question of special sex nerves and centers; their hierarchy and order of development see psychology — Repre- sentative experiences of victims of self-abuse — The critical point in the devel- opment of the habit — Psychic and moral effect of spontaneous emissions — State of mind which leads youth to quacks — Unique opportunity for, and efficacy of, religion — Inadequacy of ethical teaching in cases — Ignorance and neglect of parents and preachers — Limited insight and knowledge of physi- cians— Devices of quackery and the extent of its influence — Proper food and regimen — Kind of instruction needed — Special methods of amelioration and of prevention.
For biology the plasmata in general and the protoplasms in particular, under many names and aspects, occupy a posi- tion of ever-increasing interest and preeminence. Unlike ether, the still more or less hypothetical background of all physical existence, protoplasm is a tangible reality accessible to many and ever more subtle methods of study, and like Schopenhauer's basal will to Hve, its all-dominant impulse is to progressive self-expression. It is the creator of the as- cending series of types and species of plants and animals, which become its habits of self-formulation, although all that have so far existed do not yet fully express it. It unites suc- cessive generations into an unbroken continuum, so that they bud, the later from the earlier, each ontological link organiz- ing a soma of gradually lessening vitality doomed to death, while it remains immortal in the phylum. Bonnet speaks of an unique animated fluid which the Architect of the universe has sown through living bodies as he has sown worlds through the celestial spaces. The most primitive and characteristic cellular expression of protoplasm is in the spermatozoa and ova (which it is now thought were themselves developed out 412 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE of an indifferent or intermediate structure), the vast num- bers of which, not only in the lower forms but in man himself, illustrate its fecundity. As these primitive sex ele- ments differentiate one from the other, sex organs, secondary and ancillary to their needs in all their vast variety and beauty of form and exact adaptation to each other, through- out the plant and animal kingdom, are developed. Nerves and brains themselves, and all their functions, from the most elemental tropism toward light, air, food, gravity, etc., up through instinct to conscious soul, are the mouthpieces of germinant living substance to express its nature and needs and to light its way onward. Yet while the individual grows, thinks, and plans, his whole organism and life may have a higher and very different use for this primitive, vital sub- stance than the ends which persons or races consciously propose or even than those which their instinctive life illus- trates. History, and perhaps the whole life of all known or even possible species, may be but an incident in its develop- ment. Again there is growing reason to regard it as not only transcendent in this sense, but as a storehouse or reservoir of experiences, so that heredity itself may be a form of memory and nothing perhaps be ever lost. Thus as we watch under the microscope this marvelous substance that spins out filaments, foams, develops granules or films, vibrates, takes on or puts off various forms of organization in its ceaseless Heraclitic becoming, which even histological methods and stains but half reveal and half conceal, we can not repress some degree of the sentiment which declared the undevout astronomer mad, because we here contemplate the one un- broken physical source and origin of all life which makes its most diverse forms forever akin. As variations increase with the number of atoms in a molecule, there may be, ac- cording to Caley and Peirce, " billions or trillions of pro- toplasmic substances, and not one only, as was once as- sumed."
As most closely related to this great pleromal sea of life, abounding stand in the higher plants and animals the sexual organs, which in ancient phallicism and in the modern love of flowers are objects of great esthetic interest and curiosity. In them and their function, life reaches its maximal intensity SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT 4^3 and performs its supreme function. The vita sexualis is normally a magnificent symphony, the rich and varied or- chestration of which brings the individual into the closest rapport with the larger life of the great Biologos, and with- out which his life would be a mere film or shadow. As this vast subject looms up to the psychologist and he begins to catch glimpses of its long-neglected wealth and beauty over- grown with foul and noxious fungoids and haunted by all the evil spirits that curse human life; as he clearly sees to what a degree art, science, religion, the home, the school, and civili- zation itself suffer from this degradation; as he understands the all-conditioning importance of normality of primary acts and organs and the hitherto unsuspected range of quaUties that are now coming to reveal themselves as secondary sexual both in their origin and in their present deeper relationship, he realizes that it is his preeminent prerogative and duty, from which it would be base cowardice to shrink, to sound a cry of warning in terms plain enough if possible to shock both quacks and prudes, who have, the one perverted, and the other obscured, the plain path of life for adolescence.
I. The sexual organs make procreation surer, less waste- ful, and probably far more hedonic as we ascend the scale of being. In the human fetus the testes can be detected as early as the sixth week, and at the close of the third month they can be discriminated from the ovaries. The genital tubercle from which the male glans is to grow can be seen by the tenth week, Minot ^ finds that the male and female organs have seven parts in common, while there are thirteen homologies which are slowly dififerentiated as the embryo becomes fully sexed. In hermaphrodites, which Duval and many since have studied, sexual differentiation which ought to take place in embryonic life has been incomplete, and sometimes, as in the still unparalleled case of Leport, who at sixteen was predominantly a girl and at sixty-five a man, the qualities of the two sexes are nearly balanced, but usually even in these cases one predominates. The testes of the frog grow around the ovaries, and one or the other is absorbed 4H THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE as sex declares itself, and in many other cases we now know that the embryological truth of Plato's myth of the bifurcation of an originally bisexual man was a periphrastic adumbra- tion. Geigel ^ found two kinds of developmental variability, one group being due to more or less rapidity in the evolution of the parts peculiar to each sex, which he referred to vary- ing local nutritive activity, and another group differentiated by the very variable time of the disappearance of parts peculiar to the opposite sex, due, he thought, to circulatory and resorptive differences. In the animal and even plant series closely allied species have great variability of sex parts and functions, the same organs sometimes producing al- ternately eggs and spermatozoa, while lower down we find many creatures that may reproduce either by fission or divi- sion or sexually.
Dr.. F. N. Seerley, who has examined over 2,000 normal young men as well as many young women, tells me that in his opinion individual variations in these parts are much greater even than those of face or form, and that the range of adult and apparently normal size and proportion as well as function, and of both the age and order of development, not only of each of the several parts themselves, but of all their immediate annexes, and in females as well as males, is far greater than has been recognized by any writer. This fact is the basis of the anxieties and fears of morphological abnormality, to be discussed later, and so frequent during adolescence. Normal development here is a physiological sine qua non, conditioning that of many traits of mind and body not usually recognized as sexual.
The significance of the normal evolution of these organs is seen in the 'great preponderance of defect due to both congenital conformation and to anomalies of evolution seen in defectives, among whom variations are still greater. In 507 delinquents examined by Marro,^ over 10 per cent were abnormal in these organs as compared with 2 per cent among others. Out of 728 youthful epileptics and idiots studied ' Geigel, Richard. Ueber Variabilitat in der Entwicklung der Geschlechtsorgane beim Menschen. "Wiirzburg, 1883. « La Puberty, p. 78.
«« SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT by Bourneville and Sollier/ 262 had anomalies of these parts, a percentage which they call " enormously more " than that which was found among 299,270 conscripts from all classes, who were their bases of comparison. Varicocele, especially prevalent among young epileptics, hydrocele, epi- spadias, hypospadias, and other defects of the urinal passage, cryptochordias, and other testicular imperfections, especially on the left side, often complicated with hernia (130 cases), phimosis and other abnormalities of the prepuce, and various forms of arrest or defect, with occasional hypertrophies, both of structure and of function, that dwarf other lines of growth, are the chief troubles. It would be interesting to. know how many of these cases had reproductive power.
Puberty literally means becoming hairy. Hair first de- velops in the pubic region at about fourteen in boys and thir- teen in girls, generally before menstruation, later under the arm-pits just before the period of most rapid development of the breasts, and last comes the beard at the age of eighteen or nineteen. Tardiness or absence of the latter suggests arrest of the other later and higher qualities. Folk-lore proverbs and popular opinion warns us against beardless men. Marro (p. 79) publishes the following percentages of absence of beard at twenty years of age to show the difference between criminal and normal persons: Assassins 16.2 Crime against persons 17.0 Rape 8. 3 Brigands 12.0 Incendiaries 16.6 Swindlers 4. 3 Thieves n.o Vagabonds 20. 3 Average 13.9 Normal 1.5 Anomalies in the development of hair are common in defectives, but beard among bearded races seems a sign of mature virility, and although man may be gradually losing the hairy coat of his anthropoid ancestor, defect here is, at least now, a stigma of degeneration. The hair of the head often changes slightly in color and texture and may become straighter at puberty, and bafdness and grayness increase fast at senescence. Vigor and beauty of hair and beard, and some think the quality and odor of their sebaceous ' Anomalies des Organes g^nitaux chez les Idiots at les Epileptiques. Prog.
4i6 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE glands, which, Hke all other glands, are in mysterious rapport with those involved in reproduction, are sexual charms. Beard and absence of hair on the body may be products of sexual secretion. The hair is normally at its best at the acme of sexual vitality. Its fetishisms then take their rise and its coififure among savages is most elaborate. Just what this relation means in the present and in the evolutionary past is an unsolved problem.
The pubertal changes which take place in the male organs, besides those that are more obvious owing to their external condition, have received far less attention than has been bestowed by morphologists, physiologists, and gynecologists upon those of the female, and the sympathetic reverberations of these changes upon the whole organism are far less known. The corpora spongiosa, and still more the corpora cavernosa, increase to perhaps double their length and thickness, so that their vascularity and erethism is greatly augmented. The glans become larger and more sensitive, whether by in- crease in the size or number of the end bulbs and Pacinian corpuscles of touch and greater irritability of nerve centers, or by more local blood supply, is not known. The prepuce is more or less retracted on the glans and more mobile upon it, and grows more in circumference than in breadth or thick- ness. The glands of Tyson become active, and their odorifer- ous secretions, which in animals play an important role for sex, increase or sometimes now begin. The network of lymphatics grows more dense and active, and new dangers of uncleanliness and irritation, both of which may cause ab- normal states, now arise. These dangers are so great and obvious that many primitive races have practised circumcision at this age as a preventive. The prostate glands and those of Cowper, as well as the seminal vesicles, develop in size and function.
The scrotum expands to more than twice its former size, the spermatic cord lengthens, the testes descend fur- ther and enlarge greatly. They also become more variable in size and activity with the conditions of the vita sexualis. The testes are developed in the abdomen, beginning just below the kidneys, and slowly migrate downward toward the scrotum during the later months of intra-uterine life.
SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT 41?
Normally they grow at the same time. Arrest, both of descent and growth, and even atrophy and absence of one or both may occur, as the comprehensive monograph of E. Godard ^ shows, although mature function without descent may occur. Many hypotheses have been put forth to explain the descent, its relation to growth, to hernia, disease, ab- normal secretions, all the many anomalies of form, and their re-ascent by excess or shock into the crural canal, the perineal region, or even to the iliac fossa. Non-descent, common to many animals, in man usually implies absence of function, and puberty is the last stage of life at which belated descent can be hoped for. They grow rapidly at adolescence to an average weight of i6 grams. Scrotic tonicity, which in part determines the degree of pendency of the testes, is in hardly less delicate rapport with states of brain, cord, and psyche than in the knee-jerk or the dilation and contraction of the iris. General debility or excessive function, like approaching old age, may cause relaxation, especially on the left side, which is lowest in most men, but artificial sup- port is rarely necessary. The scrotic reflex is far more widely irradiated on the thighs and abdomen at puberty. The veins of the scrotum have few or no valves. For animals that go on all-fours and have no pendency, valves are unneces- sary, but the upright position and pendency together are hard on these veins, and varicocele of more or less intensity and often transient is frequent shortly after adult size is attained. This is another cause of fears that are usually excessive, for this trouble has little and probably nothing whatever to do with excess of sexual function. Again, the motor-waves of the scrotum begin at this age and are anal- ogous to the peristaltic action of the intestines, and like them reflect psychic states, and also probably general, and not merely special, sexual tension. They decline at senescence with the decrease of the secretions that are thus propelled along the epididymis and the long vas deferens. These changes have been superstitiously used for auguries of pro- creation, and all of them are often the basis of groundless fears. In few parts and functions of our bodies can Nature * Etudes sur la Monochordie et la Cryptochordie, p. 164. 28 41 8 THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ADOLESCENCE be more complacently trusted if allowed to work out her own way unmolested.
The chief physical fact of male puberty, about which all the other physical changes center, is that now true spermatozoids are formed. The seminiferous canals, hith- erto round and smooth, become turgid by the development of large spermatophore cells which produce clusters of spermatozoa. The processes by which these latter arise within the walls of the canals has for a quarter of a century been a theme of continuous research, theory, and controversy. The primitive male cell, unlike the female cell which long remains stationary, undergoes many divisions before true sperm cells are formed. Geddes and Thompson prefer the following pedigree and nomenclature (p. 113): First, the primitive sex cell or male ovule; this is modified over into the mother sperm cell of spermatogonium; this divides into spermatocytes, and from these descend the spermatides or immature cells which differentiate into spermatozoa. The vast complexity and obscurity of these processes is only equaled by their importance.
When spermatozoa were first discovered by Hamm., a pupil of Leeuwenhoek, at Leyden, in 1677, they were thought to be parasites, and only near the middle of this century were their origin and function known. They are only about -^^ of an inch in diameter, and according to Lode ^ 226,257,- 000 are produced in both testicles per week, or 339,385,- 500,000 during thirty years of vigorous sexual life. This vast number seems a relict of the great fecundity of lower forms of life maintained, perhaps, because of their small size and the corresponding improbability of any single cell find- ing an ovum. Here, if anywhere in the human organism, life still remains a continuous cell division from one genera- tion to another, and as in certain protozoan forms of life, there is no death and no corpse. Every other physical process and every act of life may be regarded as but the wriggle of flagella to bring these elements to their highest maturity before and after their union with ova, to effect that union under the most favorable terms, etc. At any rate, the spermatozoa and ova, the elements of which preexist in the SEXUAL DEVELOPMENT 419 infant body, but which come to maturity at puberty, are elements of a very different and far higher biological order than any other tissue or organ. To their interests, could we only know them, all others whatsoever should yield, and they might be regarded as in some sense the highest criteria of every act or mode of life, whatever our views of Weis- mann's theories.
It is not wholly the accumulation of sexual fluid in and its pressure on the walls of the vesicles that causes the first ejaculation by reflex action. Accessory secretions often precede, and the phenomena of pro-spermatogenesis, some- times not without much pain, often precede functional matur- ity. The first spontaneous but perfectly normal activity of the sex organs at puberty constitute a group of psycho- physical phenomena so new that great perturbations are often caused, upon which quacks know so well how to play by exciting morbid fears. Sometimes the testicular secre- tions, although abundantly produced, do not appear with- out, but are resorbed in situ, partly at least by the rich plexi of lymphatics which surround these canals, and this seems one of Nature's provisions to both aid and to utilize chastity. The influence of the presence of spermatic fluid upon the voice, muscular vigor, hair, growth, etc., are vast and ob- scure but very tempting fields for research and theory. Beunis thinks the first secretions of sperm begin between ten and fifteen, but contain no spermatozoa. These, Mante- gazza thinks, do not normally appear, or at least ripen, before eighteen or twenty, but Bierent thought he found them in sixty cases at thirteen to fifteen, which conclusion agrees with that of Fredericq and Nuel, and from this he distinguishes three stages of adolescence: a premonitory, when spermatic secretions occur; a period of first ejaculation and menstruation usually marked by much perturbation; and third, the age, a year or more later, of maturity and repro- ductive power. This nearly corresponds with Marro's three stages of preparation, acceleration, and perfection of ado- lescent development.