he growing girl is injured by the causes just
mentioned" (forced and continued study at the sexual epoch) "would
carry me upon subjects unfit for full discussion in these pages; but
no thoughtful reader can be much at a loss as to my meaning." ...
"To-day the American woman is, to speak plainly, 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 now-a-days she is
eager to share with the man?"[20]

In our schools it is the ambitious and conscientious girls, those who
have in them the stuff of which the noblest women are made, that
suffer, not the romping or lazy sort; and thus our modern ways of
education provide for the "non-survival of the fittest." A speaker
told an audience of women at Wesleyan Hall not long ago, that he once
attended the examination of a Western college, where a girl beat the
boys in unravelling the intracacies of Juvenal. He did not report the
consumption of blood and wear of brain tissue that in her college way
of study correlated her Latin, or hint at the possibility of arrested
development. Girls of bloodless skins and intellectual faces may be
seen any day, by those who desire the spectacle, among the scholars of
our high and normal schools,--faces that crown, and skins that cover,
curving spines, which should be straight, and neuralgic nerves that
should know no pain. Later on, when marriage and maternity overtake
these girls, and they "live laborious days" in a sense not intended by
Milton's line, they bend and break beneath the labor, like loaded
grain before a storm, and bear little fruit again. A training that
yields this result is neither fair to the girls nor to the race.

Let us quote the authority of such an acute and sagacious observer as
Dr. Maudsley, in support of the physiological and pathological views
that have been here presented. Referring to the physiological
condition and phenomena of the first critical epoch, he says, "In the
great mental revolution caused by the development of the sexual system
at puberty, we have the most striking example of the intimate and
essential sympathy between the brain, as a mental organ, and other
organs of the body. The change of character at this period