tions when it is at all in excess. Their nerve-centres being in a state of greater instability, by reason of the development of their reproductive functions, they will be the more easily and the more seriously deranged. A great argument used in favor of a mixed education is that it affords adequate stimulants to girls for thorough and sustained work, which have hitherto been a want in girls' schools; that it makes them less desirous to fit themselves only for society, and content to remain longer and work harder at school. Thus it is desired that emulation should be used in order to stimulate them to compete with boys in mental exercises and aims, while it is not pretended they can or should compete with them in those out-door exercises and pursuits which are of such great benefit in ministering to bodily health, and to success in which boys, not unwisely perhaps, attach scarcely less honor than to intellectual success. It is plain, then, that the stimulus of competition in studies will act more powerfully upon them, not only because of their greater constitutional susceptibility, but because it is left free to act without the compensating balance of emulation in other fields of activity. Is it right, may well be asked, that it should be so applied? Can woman rise high in spiritual development of any kind unless she take a holy care of the temple of her body?[1]
A small volume, entitled "Sex in Education," which has been published recently by Dr. Edward Clarke, of Boston, formerly a professor in Harvard College, contains a somewhat startling description of the baneful effects upon female health which have been produced by an excessive educational strain. It is asserted that the number of female graduates of schools and colleges who have been permanently disabled to a greater or less degree by improper methods of study, and by a disregard of the reproductive apparatus and its functions, is so great as to excite the gravest alarm, and to demand the serious attention of the community. "If these causes should continue for the next half-century, and increase in the same ratio as they have for the last fifty years, it requires no prophet to foretell that the wives who are to be the mothers in our republic must be drawn from transatlantic homes. The sons of the New World will have to react, on a magnificent scale, the old story of unwived Rome and the Sabines." Dr. Clarke relates the clinical histories of several cases of tedious illness, in which he traced the cause unhesitatingly to a disregard of the function of the female organization. Irregularity, imperfection, arrest, or excess, occurs in consequence of the demand made upon the vital powers at times when there should rightly be an intermission or remission of labor, and is
- ↑ Of all the intellectual errors of which men have been guilty, perhaps none is more false and has been more mischievous in its consequences than the theologico-metaphysical doctrine which inculcated contempt of the body as the temple of Satan, the prison-house of the spirit, from which the highest aspiration of mind was to get free. It is a foolish and fruitless labor to attempt to divorce or put asunder mind and body, which Nature has joined together in essential unity; and the right culture of the body is not less a duty than, is indeed essential to, the right culture of the mind.
