2o6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



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 reproduc- 

 tive functions, they will be the more easily and the more seriously de- 

 ranged. 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 ac- 

 tivity. 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 ? ^ 



A small volume, entitled " Sex in Education," which has been pub- 

 lished 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 w^ho 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 unw^ived 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 fe- 

 male 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 whicli men have been guilty, perhaps none is more 

 false and has been more mischievous in its consequences than the theologico-metaphysi- 

 cal 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. 



