and eighteen, unless it can be done with careful reference to their
bodily health. To-day, the American woman is, to speak plainly, too
often physically unfit for her duties as woman, and is perhaps of all
civilized females the least qualified to undertake those weightier tasks
which tax so heavily the nervous system of man. She is not fairly up to
what nature asks from her as wife and mother. How will she sustain
herself under the pressure of those yet more exacting duties which
nowadays she is eager to share with the man?

While making these stringent criticisms, I am anxious not to be
misunderstood. The point which above all others I wish to make is this,
that owing chiefly to peculiarities of climate, our growing girls are
endowed with organizations so highly sensitive and impressionable that
we expose them to needless dangers when we attempt to overtax them
mentally. In any country the effects of such a course must be evil, but
in America I believe it to be most disastrous.

As I have spoken of climate in the broad sense as accountable for some
peculiarities of the health of our women, so also would I admit it as
one of the chief reasons why work among men results so frequently in
tear as well as wear. I believe that something in our country makes
intellectual work of all kinds harder to do than it is in Europe; and
since we do it with a terrible energy, the result shows in wear very
soon, and almost always in the way of tear also. Perhaps few persons who
look for evidence of this fact at our national career alone will be
willing to admit my proposition, but among the higher intellectual
workers, such as astronomers, physicists, and naturalists, I have
frequently heard this belief expressed, and by none so positively as
those who have lived on both continents. Since this paper was first
written I have been at some pains to learn directly from Europeans who
have come to reside in America how this question has been answered by
their experience. For obvious reasons, I do not name my witnesses, who
are numerous; but, although they vary somewhat in the proportion of the
effects which they ascribe to climate and to such domestic peculiarities
as the overheating of our houses, they are at one as regards the simple
fact that, for some reason, mental work is more exhausting here than in
Europe; while, as a rule, such Americans as have worked abroad are well
aware that in France and in England intellectual labor is less try