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The old notion that sexual activity is merely a matter of the voluntary exercise, or abstinence from exercise, of the reproductive functions of adult persons has too long obstructed any clear vision of the fact that sexuality, in the wide and deep sense, is independent of the developments of puberty.
Here, too, boys went naked until the approach of puberty; the cocoanut palms, the dense banana groves, even the huge earthen water-jars before the houses recalled the charming isle of the Singhalese, and if the people were less kindly to the stranger they were much more joyful and full of laughter than the Mexican of the plateau. In this perhaps they had more in common with the Burmese.
The sleep walking begins, in accordance with the sexual basic motive, at the time of puberty and lasts until it is inhibited by the close of that period or in women with the birth of the first child.
Now the period of life at which initiation takes place is regularly puberty; and this fact suggests that the special danger which totemism and systems like it are intended to obviate is supposed not to arise till sexual maturity has been attained, in fact, that the danger apprehended is believed to attend the relation of the sexes to each other.
"If you haven't a rattan do the best you can with a creeper." It is difficult to say exactly at what age puberty begins with the youths. The girls mostly begin their courses in the fourteenth or fifteenth year.
Not that the laws of health may be violated with impunity at puberty or any other time of a woman's life; but a law of health is no more binding upon a young woman than it is upon a young man; and there really is no such thing as one law for women and another for men." Age of Puberty. In the temperate regions the age of puberty is reached between the ages of twelve and fourteen years.
The loss of mental alertness which is said by some to be peculiar to the Natives at the time of puberty is very often met with in the European youth or girl at that period of life.
Civilized nations, in their heraldic bearings, preserve traces of the same custom. Female children are always betrothed within a few days after their birth; and from the moment they are betrothed the parents cease to have any control over the future settlement of their child. Should the first husband die before the girl has attained the years of puberty she then belongs to his heir.
In gaining control of it we must find our auxiliary in the fact that puberty is the efflorescence not only of a new physical but a new psychic force. The ideal world naturally unfolds itself to the boy or girl at puberty.
With girls the measures adopted are of a more elaborate character than is the case with boys, because, for reasons already stated, the occurrence of puberty in girls gives the supernatural act a more startling and significant character. Hence the strict seclusion of girls almost universally practised among uncivilised peoples.
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