214 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



these functions. In this matter the small minority of women who 

 have other aims and pant for other careers, cannot be accepted as the 

 spokeswomen of their sex. Experience may be left to teach them, as 

 it will not fail to do, whether they are right or wrong in the ends 

 which they pursue and in the means by which they pursue them : if- 

 they are right, they will have deserved well the success which will re- 

 ward their faith and works ; if they are wrpng, the error will avenge 

 itself upon them and upon their children, if they should ever have 

 any. In the worst event they will not have been without their use as 

 failures ; for they will have furnished exj)eriments to aid us in arriv- 

 ing at correct judgments concerning the capacities of women and their 

 right functions in the universe. Meanwhile, so far as our present 

 lights reach, it would seem that a system of education adapted to 

 women should have regard to the peculiarities of their constitution, to 

 the special functions in life for which they are destined, and to the 

 range and kind of practical activity, mental and bodily, to which they 

 would seem to be foreordained by their sexual organization of body 

 and mind. 



XoTE. — It is fair to say that other reasons for the alleged degen- 

 eracy of American women are given. For example, a correspondent 

 writes from America : " The medical mind of the United States is 

 arrayed in a very ill-tempered opj^osition, on assumed physiological 

 grounds, to the higher education of women in a continuous curriculum, 

 and especially to that coeducation which some colleges in the Western 

 States, Oberlin, Antioch, inaugurated twenty years ago, and which 

 latterly Cornell University has adopted. The experience of Cornell 

 is too recent to prove any thing ; but the Quaker college of Swarth- 

 more claims a steady improvement on the health of its girl-graduates, 

 dating from the commencement of their college course ; and the West- 

 ern colleges report successful results, mentally, morally, and physi- 

 cally, from their coeducation experiment. Ignoring these facts, the 

 doctors base their war-cry on the not-to-be-disputed fact that Ameri- 

 can women are growing into more and more of invalidism with every 

 year. Something of this is perhaps due to climate. I will not say to 

 food ; for the American menu^ in the cities at least, has improved since 

 Mr. Dickens's early days, and has learned to combine French dainti- 

 ness, very happily, with the substantial requirements of an English 

 table. 



"American men, as a rule, ' break down ' between forty and fifty, 

 when an Englishman is but beginning to live his public and useful life. 

 The mad excitement of business you liave, as well as we ; so it must 

 be the unrest of the climate, and their unphilosophical refusal of open- 

 air pleasures and exercise, which are to blame in the case of the men. 



" There are other reasons which go to make up the languid young- 

 ladyhood of the American girl. Her childhood is denied the happy 



