feeble race; and, if he is a physiological
observer, he is sure to add, They will give birth to a feeble race,
not of women only, but of men as well. "I never saw before so many
pretty girls together," said Lady Amberley to the writer, after a
visit to the public schools of Boston; and then added, "They all
looked sick." Circumstances have repeatedly carried me to Europe,
where I am always surprised by the red blood that fills and colors
the faces of ladies and peasant girls, reminding one of the canvas of
Rubens and Murillo; and am always equally surprised on my return, by
crowds of pale, bloodless female faces, that suggest consumption,
scrofula, anemia, and neuralgia. To a large extent, our present system
of educating girls is the cause of this palor and weakness. How our
schools, through their methods of education, contribute to this
unfortunate result, and how our colleges that have undertaken to
educate girls like boys, that is, in the same way, have succeeded in
intensifying the evils of the schools, will be pointed out in another
place.

It has just been said that the educational methods of our schools and
colleges for girls are, to a large extent, the cause of "the thousand
ills" that beset American women. Let it be remembered that this is not
asserting that such methods of education are the sole cause of female
weaknesses, but only that they are one cause, and one of the most
important causes of it. An immense loss of female power may be fairly
charged to irrational cooking and indigestible diet. We live in the
zone of perpetual pie and dough-nut; and our girls revel in those
unassimilable abominations. Much also may be credited to artificial
deformities strapped to the spine, or piled on the head, much to
corsets and skirts, and as much to the omission of clothing where it
is needed as to excess where the body does not require it; but, after
the amplest allowance for these as causes of weakness, there remains a
large margin of disease unaccounted for. Those grievous maladies which
torture a woman's earthly existence, called leucorrhoea, amenorrhoea,
dysmenorrhoea, chronic and acute ovaritis, prolapsus uteri, hysteria,
neuralgia, and the like, are indirectly affected by food, clothing,
and exercise; they are directly and largely affected by the causes
that will be presently pointed out, and which arise from a neglect of
the peculiarities of a woman's organization. The regimen of our
schools fosters this negle