nification of co-education, and, as we apprehend, the one
in which it is commonly used, includes time, place, government,
methods, studies, and regimen. This is identical co-education. This
means, that boys and girls shall be taught the same things, at the
same time, in the same place, by the same faculty, with the same
methods, and under the same regimen. This admits age and proficiency,
but not sex, as a factor in classification. It is against the
co-education of the sexes, in this sense of identical co-education,
that physiology protests; and it is this identity of education, the
prominent characteristic of our American school-system, that has
produced the evils described in the clinical part of this essay, and
that threatens to push the degeneration of the female sex still
farther on. In these pages, co-education of the sexes is used in its
common acceptation of identical co-education.

Let us look for a moment at what identical co-education is. The law
has, or had, a maxim, that a man and his wife are one, and that the
one is the man. Modern American education has a maxim, that boys'
schools and girls' schools are one, and that the one is the boys'
school. Schools have been arranged, accordingly, to meet the
requirements of the masculine organization. Studies have been selected
that experience has proved to be appropriate to a boy's intellectual
development, and a regimen adopted, while pursuing them, appropriate
to his physical development. His school and college life, his methods
of study, recitations, exercises, and recreations, are ordered upon
the supposition, that, barring disease or infirmity, punctual
attendance upon the hours of recitation, and upon all other duties in
their season and order, may be required of him continuously, in spite
of ennui, inclement weather, or fatigue; that there is no week in the
month, or day in the week, or hour in the day, when it is a physical
necessity to relieve him from standing or from studying,--from
physical effort or mental labor; that the chapel-bell may safely call
him to morning prayer from New Year to Christmas, with the assurance,
that, if the going does not add to his stock of piety, it will not
diminish his stock of health; that he may be sent to the gymnasium and
the examination-hall, to the theatres of physical and intellectual
display at any time,--in short, that he develops health and strength,
blood and nerve, intellect and life, by a regular, uninterrupted