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Contrectation signifies a desire to touch the skin. It is a part of popular belief about the sexual impulse that it is absent in childhood and that it first appears in the period of life known as puberty. This, though a common error, is serious in its consequences and is chiefly due to our present ignorance of the fundamental principles of the sexual life.
The motive for the restraints so commonly imposed on girls at puberty is the deeply engrained dread which primitive man universally entertains of menstruous blood.
No ceremony takes place at the time of naming or at the age of puberty, but at the latter period the teeth are filed and blackened so that the young person may be more beautiful and, therefore, able to contract a suitable marriage.
Not only had the young to be fed and cared for during infancy and childhood, but, as they grew in years, they had to be guarded from the father, whose relation to his offspring was that of an enemy. It has been seen how the sons were banished at puberty from the family group to maintain the patriarch’s marital rights.
In proof of this it was contended: that in the Bull it had been stated that Henry desired to marry Catharine, and that the marriage was necessary for preserving peace between England and Spain, both of which statements, it was alleged, were false; that at the time the disposition was granted Henry was only twelve years of age and therefore incapable of accepting it; that several persons mentioned in the Bull, as for example, Queen Isabella and Henry VII., had died before the marriage took place; and lastly that when Henry reached the age of puberty he had protested against the marriage, thereby renouncing for himself the favours granted in the Bull of dispensation.
Though what happens at puberty, what happens all through life through the agencies of the endocrines is amazing enough, what occurs during the period of child-bearing is perhaps the most amazing of all. As emphasized, pregnancy is the time, among the internal secretions, of a great uprooting and stirring, of fundamental and cataclysmic changes in the most intimate chemistry of the cells.
Frequently parents arrange matches for their children while they are still very young, but in the majority of cases the matter is left until after the age of puberty when the wishes of the young people are taken into consideration. The youth or his father having chosen a suitable girl takes or sends a spear, knife, or other acceptable present to her father.
Among individuals in whom the juvenile thymus persists after puberty, no growth of hair occurs on the face, and in precocious involution or destruction of the pineal, hair appears on the face and in other terminal regions in children of six or less, a symptom classical in the child who suffered from a tumor of the pineal, and discussed immortality with his physicians.
Seclusion of girls at puberty in Mabuiag, Torres Straits, 36 sq.; in Northern Australia, 37-39; in the islands of Torres Straits, 39-41. Seclusion of Girls at Puberty among the Indians of North America, pp. 41-55.
Luther's life from the age of puberty to his marriage was, indeed, a fight against temptations to unchastity. Is it anything else in the case of other men? The physical effects of adolescence, as we remarked before, are a natural and morally pure phenomenon; Luther's frank way of speaking of them does not make them impure.
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