Thus, sometimes, a wide deviation from the average age we have stated occurs, without having any serious meaning. Yet at no time is such a deviation to be neglected. In nine out of ten instances it is owing to some fault in the constitution, the health, or formation, which should be ascertained and corrected. Otherwise years of broken health and mental misery may be the sad results. Mothers, teachers, it is with you this responsibility rests. The thousands of wretched wives, who owe their wretchedness to a neglect of proper attention at this turning-point of their lives, warn you how serious is this responsibility.
The foundation of old age, says a distinguished author, is laid in childhood; but the health of middle-life depends upon puberty. Never was there a truer maxim. The two years which change the girl to the woman often seal for ever the happiness or the hopeless misery of her whole life. They decide whether she is to become a healthy, helpful, cheerful wife and mother, or a languid, complaining invalid, to whom marriage is a curse, children an affliction, and life itself a burden.
We reiterate our warning: Mothers, teachers, you to whom children are confided at this crisis of their lives, look well to it that you appreciate, understand, and observe the duties you have assumed. Let no false modesty prevent you from learning and enforcing those precautions, so necessary at this period of life.
WHAT HASTENS AND WHAT RETARDS PUBERTY?
As a rule, we find that those who develope early, fade early. A short childhood portends a premature old age. It often foreshadows, also, a feeble middle-life.
Having ascertained, therefore, what is the average age at which puberty takes place with us, let us see what conditions anticipate or retard this age.
The most important is climate.
In hot climates, man, like the vegetation, has a surprising rapidity of growth. Marriages are usual at twelve or fourteen years of age. Puberty comes to both sexes as early as at ten and eleven years. We even read in the life of Mohammed, that one of his wives, when but ten years of age, bore him a son. Let another dozen years pass, and these blooming maidens have been metamorphosed into wrinkled, faded old women. The beauty of their precocious youth has withered almost literally like a flower which is plucked.
Very different is it in the cold and barren regions of the far north. There man, once more partaking of the nature of his surroundings, yields as slowly to the impulses of his passions as does the ice-bound earth to the slanting rays of the summer sun. Maturity, so quick to come, so swift to leave in the torrid heats, arrives, chilled by the long winters, to the girls of Lapland, Norway, and Siberia, only when they are eighteen and nineteen years of age. But, in return for this, they retain their vigor and good looks to a green old age.
Between these extremes, including as they do the whole second decade of existence, this important change takes place normally in different latitudes. We have said that in the middle temperate zone the proper age is fourteen years and six months. Let us now see what conditions lead to deviations from this age in our climate.