n a quiet country town,
alone can measure the amount of brain activity which has been carried on
for that time; and yet we drive and force this activity from her
earliest years, when we ought only to direct it. We exhibit her in her
babyhood to crowds of admiring and exciting friends, we overwhelm her
with an unreasonable number and variety of exciting toys, we tease her
to repeat her little sayings for the amusement of grown people, and
lastly, we send her to school to be still more excited, and to have vast
additional fields of knowledge of a different kind open to her. The fact
is, that no child is ready to go to school till she has had time enough
allowed for the dazzling and exciting illumination which pervades the
atmosphere of childhood, to

"die away
And fade into the light of common day."

We send children to school--or rather we begin voluntarily to teach
them, too early by several years, and the only result is that the brain
is "too early overstrained, and in consequence of such precocious and
excessive action, the foundation for a morbid excitation of the whole
nervous system is laid in earliest childhood." As far as the home-life
fosters this over-activity, that is, before the time of school life, I
think it will be readily acknowledged that this showing-off process is
applied with greater force to girls than to boys. The boy is left more
to his own devices, but the girl must be made to contribute more to the
general amusement of the family, and she must learn "to make herself
useful." It is true that to be of service to others, in a rational
sense, should be her ruling motive of action, but one may, perhaps,
question whether such early expectation, in such ways, be not, at least,
"penny wise and pound foolish." To this cause may be attributed a great
part of the failure in the health at the last special time of
development.

As to the mental progress made, John Stuart Mill may, as he says, have
entered life "a quarter of a century in advance of his contemporaries,"
but was he a quarter of a century ahead of others of his own age when he
left it? The question is at least suggestive of the truth.

But, with the development of the organs which are so indissolubly
associated with the deepest feelings and with the mental powers, there
is also a corresponding mental development. Not only does "the blood
rush more vigorously, the muscular strength become more easily roused