FEMALE EDUCATION. 331 



knowledge to a very high degree. They get pushed to their bent, 

 and with all this they have little craving for fresh air and romping. 

 They are often over-conscientious and most receptive. In fact, they 

 are the very young women that delight the heart of the teacher, and 

 sometimes carry off all the prizes at the end of a school session. The 

 treatment of the teacher and the physician would be exactly opposite 

 for such cases. The physician would take such brains to put them to 

 grass for two or three generations — would scarcely educate them at 

 all in the ordinary sense — would send them to grow up almost unin- 

 structed in the country, cultivating blood, bone, muscle, and doing 

 mechanical work alone. That would be the only salvation for such 

 brains. But then we should perhaps miss having a genius once in a 

 century. We should have our Chattertons working as joiners in the 

 country, instead of writing poetry and committing suicide in town 

 garrets. I could adduce many lamentable examples, from my own 

 experience, of most brilliant school careers ending in insanity. If I 

 had written down the fierce apostrophe of a young lady of twenty on 

 her entry into the asylum at Morningside, at the end of a school career 

 of unexampled success, the reading of it would do more to frighten 

 the ambitious parents of such children from hastening their daughters 

 forward at school too fast than all the scientific protests we doctors 

 can make. She was well aware of the cause of her illness, and with 

 passionate eloquence enumerated the consequences of her losing her 

 reason. 



It is not very long since a pupil-teacher, who had been working all 

 winter about ten hours a day in teaching and preparation, and had 

 taken no exercise or fresh air at all, after suffering for a while from 

 headaches and confusion of mind, threw herself into a pond. She 

 told me afterward that the harder she worked the more confused she 

 got, then she got depressed, and then lost her self-control. 



There can be no doubt that too hard school-work in young women 

 during the adolescent period tends to bring out hereditary, nervous, 

 and other weaknesses. The great natural protection against these is 

 sound health and general bodily vigor in a frame that has been brought 

 carefully to full maturity, harmonious and healthy in all its functions. 

 This law is found to prevail in regard to nervous hereditary weak- 

 nesses, that the stronger and more direct the tendency, the earlier in 

 life such weakness is apt to show itself. If we can postpone it, we 

 can frequently avert it altogether. 



Of the chief purely mental results of a brain-education higher than 

 the whole organization can bear, one is unquestionably a certain change 

 in the natural mental type of woman. I shall be asked, of course. What 

 is the natural female psychical type ? Is it to be found in the unedu- 

 cated women of the East, or among the uncultivated classes of the West ? 

 Without going into argument, I may say that I should be willing to 

 take the general character of womanliness pervading all the various 



