Confidential Chats with Boys

by William Lee Howard

The pollen-dust of flowers is, as I have said, the seed of the male flower, just as full of life-giving energy as is the seed being produced in you—and which you must protect and save for future power and reproduction. That is, when married to be able to be the father of strong, healthy children. The Bible distinctly calls your attention to this matter, and lays down the law.

Life is a long foot race; a constant struggle to reach the tape. Now if you knew that you had this race to run and to win, would you be so foolish as to dissipate your strength, to lose sleep, to run long distances until you were completely exhausted just before you were to start on the REAL race? Of course not; yet when a young man exhausts his energies and powers by wrong living and when tired out enters upon his LIFE’S race—marriage and fatherhood—he comes to the tape wasted, exhausted and way behind the man who has trained properly. As a rule he will not finish the race—just be one of those “also ran.” He will leave weaklings on the path, poor unfortunate children who suffer all their lives because their father was UNFIT—unfit to be a father at any time. I realize these are harsh and strong words, but they tell you the truth, and I warned you that you would hear the truth.

I believe with a very strong belief that you boys to-day will be in a position to give the world better men and women than the world has ever known. You are being shown how to make yourselves fit to bring this about.

Every day I hear the cry: “Oh! Doctor Howard, if I only had known these things when I was a youth! What a different man I would be to-day!” I have had men tell me that they would willingly have cut an arm off for such knowledge as you boys are getting, and considered the fee cheap at that.

We will now leave the flowers and their forms of reproduction and get right into things that every boy sees, yet had not had a thorough understanding of what relations they bear to his life and those dear to him.

To repeat: All life comes from an egg. You know how the eggs of fishes look as well as the fact that the shad roe you eat is a mass of eggs. The male shad is called the buck shad or the milt shad. The milt is the semen of the male shad. It is a milky-white substance. The little life-giving germs are hidden in this milk-like fluid. They are so small that it takes a powerful microscope to see them.

The eggs of the female cannot produce life unless the life germs of the male pass into them. This is true of all animals, including man. Every form of living thing has a different method of doing this, but the principle is the same for all. Let us first take the fishes.

Springtime is the season for all life to bring forth its kind. In the spring the fishes swim to their spawning or breeding places. They seek warm and generally still waters. The shad, for instance, swims up rivers until it finds the proper place. By this time the eggs are ready to be expelled from her ovaries, the sacks in which they have been forming all winter. As she lies still in the warm waters these eggs drop out in large quantities. Then she swims away, gradually making her trip down to the sea. At the same time that her eggs are ready to be deposited in the waters the male shad is filled with milt-fish semen. He is strong, vigorous, and never having wasted any of this seed he is able to give full life to the waiting eggs. He slowly swims over the floating eggs and the semen in him pours out. Once over the eggs each little life-germ wiggles through the outer lining of an egg and meets the true egg. At once these two, the female and male germ, are the beginning of a little fish. It takes some time, of course, for even the little fish to burst from its covering, for the growth from the two germ cells into a completely-formed, though tiny fish, occupies many days. But just as soon as it is ready to swim, out it comes.

The way the different kinds of fish protect their young until they can care for themselves, is an interesting study, but you can read all about such matters in your zoologies.

In breeding, or propagating, fish at the hatcheries, the eggs are squeezed out of the female and immediately after this has been done the milt from the male is squeezed out over them. This is never done except when both female and male fish are ready to deposit their eggs and sperm. By this method the little fish can be kept in confined waters, arranged according to their ages, and when old enough, be sent to replace fished-out streams.