neral principles laid down in the remarks on
exercise, not only be, from that fact, injurious to the brain, but it
will afford, at the most susceptible period of life, leisure for
reveries which can lead only to evil, moral and physical. But give our
girls steady and regular work of muscle and brain, a rational system of
exercise for both, so that the "motor and nervous systems may weary
themselves in action, and may be desirous of rest," and evil will be not
only prevented, but cured, if existing.

Even if these trashy books, which we find everywhere, not excepting the
Sunday-school libraries, be not actually exciting and immoral in tone
and sentiment, they are so vapid, so utterly without purpose or object,
so devoid of any healthy vigor and life, that they are simply
dissipating to the power of thought, and hence weakening to the will. No
one needs to be told how great is the influence of the will over
physical health, and any weakening of it tends inevitably to a
slackening of all the vital forces, by which alone we preserve health,
or even life itself.

All such books can be kept out of a house, and their entrance should be
guarded against far more vigorously than we oppose the entrance of
noxious gases, or even of draughts of pure air. Some of us, many of us,
have reason to be grateful that in our fathers' houses no such books
were to be found. Poets were there, novelists were there in abundance,
but of such poisonous and weakening literature, no trace; and as we are
grateful to our parents for the care and simple regimen which preserved
our physical health for us, we thank them also for the care which kept
out of our way the mental food which they knew to be injurious, and for
which they themselves had been too well educated to have any taste.

The possession, through the instrumentality of education, of simple and
healthy appetite and taste, physical and mental, is the most valuable
gift that the father, that the mother, can give their children, a gift
in comparison with which a legacy of millions of dollars sinks into
utter insignificance. And a tithe of the thought and care which are
expended in accumulating and investing property on the part of the one,
a tithe of the care and thought used on dress on the part of the other,
would serve to secure it!

The exclusively American habit of taking young girls to fashionable
resorts for the summer should also be alluded to here. No custom could
be more injurious