310 ' HIGHER EDUCATI0i5r FOR WOMAPT. 



rating progress. It is altogether different with the college student. 

 There that period is assumed to have been at length reached in which 

 mere pupilage is at an end. The change of name frompupil to student 

 is itself significant of this and much more. To every mind a time at 

 length comes when it passes from the merely receptive to the perceptive 

 stage ; the aims and uses of study begin to be clearly recognised ; the 

 adaptation of preliminary acquirements as means to a higher end is seen ; 

 and a willing hand is reached forth to grasp the keys that are to unlock 

 rich treasures of knowledge. 



Whenever this stage of intellectual development has been reached, 

 a change not only in the mode of instruction, but also in its place, its 

 associates, and its teachers, is all-important. The child must quit its 

 cradle, its go-cart, and all other appliances of the nursery, if it would 

 not be retarded in the healthful growth of its limbs. And so it is with 

 the mind. The school room is its fitting nursery, where it, too, developes 

 dormant powers, and learns the use of growing energies, until it claims 

 to stand alone, and to obey its own volitions. Then, the passing from 

 school to college — from halls in which it has been compelled to receive, 

 to those in which it is invited to acquire knowledge, — constitutes in the 

 very change an educational element the importance of which can scarcely 

 be overestimated. 



It is in this respect, I believe, fully as much as in any other, that 

 woman's mental culture is inadequately provided for. She is taught by 

 all the conventional usages of society to regard education as a thing 

 incompatible with womanhood. She emerges from the chrysalis state 

 of the school-girl, to " come out " into a world brilliant with flowers, 

 and butterflies, and all the gay realities of a life which recognises no 

 place for intellectual culture. She puts away education with other 

 *' childish things ;" and, while the young man looks back on college 

 life as the most covetable period of existence ; her happiest associations 

 are with the day of her emancipation from school. Nor is this a mere 

 passing fancy. It gives the key to all her conversation, and prompts 

 the style in which she is addressed. In her society good manners forbid 

 the intrusion of the sciences ; if letters venture within her hearing, the 

 pedant courteously translates his scraps of Latin for her benefit ; the 

 logician styles inconsequential reasoning Woman's Logic, and is rewarded 

 with a smile ; the mathematician is free to take for granted that in her 

 presence, 



" The hard-grained muses of the cube and square are out of season ;" 



