The sexual question in woman... this is the general study which Dr. Philip A. Ashkar is treating in the pages of this magazine. In this issue he passes to a new subject, concerning woman in her fifth decade, and it aims to bring woman to see forty as an age of hopes, not an age of despair, as she has been accustomed to see it.

They say: the diplomat is he who remembers a woman's birthday and forgets her age. By the fifth decade is not meant the years that have passed since a lady's birth, for these, however many they be, cannot trace a single line upon her radiant brow, nor weigh down her shoulders with the pains and hopes they carry. It is rather nature, which holds absolute sway over the physiology of the body, weakening some of its organs with the passage of time and stopping others from their work altogether. Among the organs whose work ceases in the fifth decade of a woman's life are her reproductive organs.

The function of reproduction in living bodies is the secret of their survival on the face of the earth, and in the higher animals it rests upon male and female; yet the importance of the female, even in mankind, is many times that of the male. From the biological standpoint, the man is an individual factor and the woman a factor of the species and the race: she is root and he is branch, she is foundation and he is accident. The sexual func-tion in the man is a surface matter; in the woman, its driving force is the instinct of motherhood, and this feeling is part of her very life — she nourishes it with her blood, and it fills every part of her inward being. Woman, whatever her color, whatever her social position, what-ever sciences she may acquire, and however far she may go in imitating man, whether in his works or his dress or his habits — addiction to drink, or smoking, or sport — the sexual factor remains dominant over her, master of her mentality and her psychology. If she marries, motherhood is the center of the circle of her being; and if she does not marry, the physiology of her reproductive organs reminds her, at fixed and regular times, of her femininity.

This phenomenon in woman's phys-

iology lasts, on the average, about forty years, beginning at the age of adolescence and ending at the start of the fifth decade. And if the onset of the menses in the girl is a cause of joy to her and to her family, as a sign of the completion of her womanhood, their cessation brings gloom and vexation — and for that reason it has been named the age of despair. Nor is this strange: the sexual function is, in woman's eyes, a part of herself and a thing necessary to her life. If she is married and her menses cease, she feels that she has become barren, and that there remains no one in her hands to nourish with her love and encircle with her tenderness. If she is single, she feels that a magic power has been lost to her which can never be recovered. And woman, married or single, holds sacred her youth and her beauty, and so imagines that with the cessation of her menses the sun of her young womanhood sets, the warmth of her youth dies down, the magic of her eyes fades, and the roses of her cheeks wither. What increases her mental disturbance in this period of her life is her own ignorance, and the ignorance of her family, of the physiology of menstruation and its relation to her life, and the sayings and strange opinions that strike her ears from mothers and neighbors, advisers and friends. So it is that when the age of despair draws near, she often complains of symptoms beyond counting and beyond describing.

Yet there are many women through whom the age of despair passes without their being affected by it. Every age, in their eyes, has its beauty; they are like the evergreen tree which, when its blossoms have dried, keeps its luster and its per-fection: many take shade beneath it, and the young of the birds sing among its branches. And between

these two extremes lie conditions of every variety, no one of them resembling another.

Among the symptoms of which a woman may complain at the cessation of her menses, and which may last several weeks or a few months, are symptoms more psychological than pathological; their occurrence is in proportion to the woman's nervous and psychological condition, and they are the result of a lack of balance among the endocrine glands in the performance of their functions. These glands are what govern the reproductive system in its entirety, and this imbalance may lie in the quantity of hor-mones which one gland secretes in relation to the others.

The imbalance causes local symp-toms and general symptoms. The

The long-awaited book has appeared

Woman: Body and Soul

by Dr. Georges Hanna

Publishers

Dar al-Ahad — Beirut

To be had from the bookshops and from the Farajallah Publications Company

Price per copy

200 piasters, or 230 millimes, or ... fils