, and of employing time
and money; and when they perceive the true estimate accorded to these
things by teachers and friends, the grand cause of this evil will be
removed. Women will be trained to secure, as of first importance, a
strong and healthy constitution, and all those rules of thrift and
economy that will make domestic duty easy and pleasant.

To promote this object, the writer prepared this volume as a _text-book_
for female schools. It has been examined by the Massachusetts Board of
Education, and been deemed worthy by them to be admitted as a part of
the Massachusetts School Library.

It has also been adopted as a text-book in some of our largest and most
popular female schools, both at the East and West.

The following, from the pen of Mr. George B. Emmerson, one of the most
popular and successful teachers in our country, who has introduced this
work as a text-book in his own school, will exhibit the opinion of one
who has formed his judgment from experience in the use of the work:

"It may be objected that such things cannot be taught by books. Why not?
Why may not the structure of the human body, and the laws of health
deduced therefrom, be as well taught as the laws of natural philosophy?
Why are not the application of these laws to the management of infants
and young children as important to a woman as the application of the
rules of arithmetic to the extraction of the cube root? Why may not the
properties of the atmosphere be explained, in reference to the proper
ventilation of rooms, or exercise in the open air, as properly as to the
burning of steel or sodium? Why is not the human skeleton as curious and
interesting as the air-pump; and the action of the brain, as the action
of a steam-engine? Why may not the healthiness of different kinds of
food and drink, the proper modes of cooking, and the rules in reference
to the modes and times of taking them, be discussed as properly as rules
of grammar, or facts in history? Are not the principles that should
regulate clothing, the rules of cleanliness, the advantages of early
rising and domestic exercise, as readily communicated as the principles
of mineralogy, or rules of syntax? Are not the rules of Jesus Christ,
applied to refine _domestic manners_ and preserve a _good temper_, as
important as the abstract principles of ethics, as taught by Paley,
Wayland, or Jouffroy? May not the advantages of neatness, system, and
order, be as well illustrated in sh