FEMALE EDUCATION. 217 



knowledge and for study. If by undue pressure you do call up and 

 use for education the energy that ought to go toward growth and 

 strengthening the body, you produce a small and unhealthy specimen 

 of humanity, just like those plants which have had their flowers un- 

 duly forced, and are deficient in bulk and hardiness, and will not pro- 

 duce seed. Nature disposes of her energies in a human being in due 

 proportion to the wants of each organ and faculty. There is a nat- 

 ural and harmonious relation which each bears to the other. This re- 

 lation is different in different persons, and at different periods of life. 

 The plowman takes up most of his energy in muscular effort and in 

 the repair of waste muscle, and he has little left for thinking. The 

 student uses his up in the mental effort of his brain, and has little left 

 for heavy muscular work. No doubt Nature is sometimes prodigal of 

 energy, and provides enough for the high-pressure working of both 

 the brain and the muscles in some cases. But this is not the rule, and 

 should not be assumed as applicable to many persons. At the differ- 

 ent periods of life Nature uses up her available energy in different 

 ways. She allocates it in babyhood chiefly to body-growth, in early 

 girlhood partly to growth and partly to brain development ; in adoles- 

 cence, the period of which I am to speak chiefly to-night, her effort 

 is evidently to complete the building up of the structures everywhere, 

 to bring to full development the various functions, to strengthen 

 and harmonize the whole body and the brain, so that they shall be 

 able to produce, and do in the succeeding years of full maturity all that 

 they are capable of. It is certainly not a period of production, but of 

 acquisition. If the original constitution derived from ancestry has 

 been good, if the conditions of life in childhood have been favorable, 

 if the education has been of the right kind, developing the whole being 

 in all her faculties equally and harmoniously after Nature's plan, and 

 if the period of adolescence has crowned and completed every organ 

 and every faculty, no faculty being unduly called on to the impov- 

 erishment of the others, then we expect, and indeed must have, a 

 woman in health, which means happiness, with the full capacity for 

 work, for production, and for resisting hurtful influences, and for liv- 

 ing her allotted time. But this can only result from a harmonious and 

 healthy development, which we may take as the physician's word to 

 denote education in his sense. It can only result from regarding the 

 woman as a unit, body and mind inseparable ; it can only result from 

 the educator's efforts being on the lines of Nature's facts, and Nature's 

 harmonies, and Nature's laws. 



Another fact in regard to the vital energies and forces of the hu- 

 man body is this : That you may use up by an undue push and press- 

 ure at one time of life the power that ought to have been spread out 

 over long periods. We see this daily in men who have had trying or 

 or excited lives and occupations. Some of them wear out soon, and 

 grow old soon, and are old men with no energy or vitality left at fifty. 



