r 1789, however, the notable discovery was
made, that the average attendance of pupils from April to October was
only one half of that reported for the remainder of the year. This was
an obvious waste of money and accommodations, and it was therefore
proposed that female pupils should be annually introduced during this
intermediate period. Accordingly, school-girls, like other flowers,
blossomed in summer only; and this state of things lasted, with
but slight modification, for some forty years, according to the
School-Superintendent's Third Report. It was not till 1828 that all
distinctions were abolished in the Boston Common Schools; in the High
Schools lingering far later, sole vestige of the "good old times,"
before a mistaken economy overthrew the wholesome doctrine of M. Sylvain
Marechal, and let loose the alphabet among women.

It is true that Eve ruined us all, according to theology, without
knowing her letters. Still, there is something to be said in defence
of that venerable ancestress. The Veronese lady, Isotta Nogarola, five
hundred and thirty-six of whose learned letters were preserved by De
Thou, composed a dialogue on the question, Whether Adam or Eve had
committed the greater sin? But Ludovico Domenichi, in his "Dialogue on
the Nobleness of Women," maintains that Eve did not sin at all, because
she was not even created when Adam was told not to eat the apple. It is
"in Adam all died," he shrewdly says; nobody died in Eve;--which
looks plausible. Be that as it may, Eve's daughters are in danger of
swallowing a whole harvest of forbidden fruit, in these revolutionary
days, unless something be done to cut off the supply.

It has been seriously asserted that during the last half-century more
books have been written by women and about women than during all the
previous uncounted ages. It may be true; although, when we think of the
innumerable volumes of _Memoires_ by Frenchwomen of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries,--each one justifying the existence of her own ten
volumes by the remark, that all her contemporaries were writing as
many,--we have our doubts. As to the increased multitude of general
treatises on the female sex, however,--its education, life, health,
diseases, charms, dress, deeds, sphere, rights, wrongs, work, wages,
encroachments, and idiosyncrasies generally,--there can be no doubt
whatever; and the poorest of these books recognizes a condition of
public sentiment which no other age ev