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ich it would be hard to find an instance in all Central Park. "Climate, undoubtedly, has something to do with this. The air is moist; and the mercury rarely rises above 80 deg., or falls below 10 deg.. Also the comparative quiet of their lives helps to make them so beautiful and strong. But the most significant fact to my mind is, that, until the past year, there have been in Nova Scotia no public schools, comparatively few private ones; and in these there is no severe pressure brought to bear on the pupils.... I must not be understood to argue from the health of the children of Nova Scotia, as contrasted with the lack of health among our children, that it is best to have no public schools; only that it is better to have no public schools than to have such public schools as are now killing off our children.... In Massachusetts, the mortality from diseases of the brain and nervous system is eleven per cent. In Nova Scotia it is only eight per cent."[36] It would be interesting and instructive to ascertain, if we could, the regimen of female education in Europe. The acknowledged and unmistakable differences between American and European girls and women--the delicate bloom, unnatural weakness, and premature decay of the former, contrasted with the bronzed complexion, developed form, and enduring force of the latter--are not adequately explained by climate. Given sufficient time, difference of climate will produce immense differences of form, color, and force in the same species of animals and men. But a century does not afford a period long enough for the production of great changes. That length of time could not transform the sturdy German fraulein and robust English damsel into the fragile American miss. Everybody recognizes and laments the change that has been and is going on. "The race of strong, hardy, cheerful girls, that used to grow up in country places, and made the bright, neat, New-England kitchens of olden times,--the girls that could wash, iron, brew, bake, harness a horse and drive him, no less than braid straw, embroider, draw, paint, and read innumerable books,--this race of women, pride of olden time, is daily lessening; and, in their stead, come the fragile, easy-fatigued, languid girls of a modern age, drilled in book-learning, ignorant of common things."[37] No similar change has been wrought, during the past century, upon the mass of females in Europe. There-- "Nature keeps the reverent fram
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