a more superficial plan as on the
whole the most useful. The man who desires to write in a popular way of
nervous women and of her who is to be taught how not to become that
sorrowful thing, a nervous woman, must acknowledge, like the Anglo-Saxon
novelist, certain reputable limitations. The best readers are, however,
in a measure co-operative authors, and may be left to interpolate the
unsaid. A true book is the author, the book and the reader. And this is
so not only as to what is left for the reader to fill in, but also has
larger applications. All this may be commonplace enough, but naturally
comes back to one who is making personal appeals without the aid of
personal presence.

Because what I shall write is meant for popular use rather than for my
own profession, I have made my statements as simple as possible.
Scarcely a fact I state, or a piece of advice I give, might not be
explained or justified by physiological reasoning which would carry me
far beyond the depth of those for whom I wrote. All this I have
sedulously avoided.

What I shall have to say in these pages will trench but little on the
mooted ground of the differences between men and women. I take women as
they are to my experience. For me the grave significance of sexual
difference controls the whole question, and, if I say little of it in
words, I cannot exclude it from my thought of them and their
difficulties. The woman's desire to be on a level of competition with
man and to assume his duties is, I am sure, making mischief, for it is
my belief that no length of generations of change in her education and
modes of activity will ever really alter her characteristics. She is
physiologically other than the man. I am concerned with her now as she
is, only desiring to help her in my small way to be in wiser and more
healthful fashion what I believe her Maker meant her to be, and to teach
her how not to be that with which her physiological construction and the
strong ordeals of her sexual life threaten her as no contingencies of
man's career threaten in like measure or like number the feeblest of the
masculine sex.

THE PHYSICIAN.

I have long had in mind to write from a physician's point of view
something in regard to the way in which the well-trained man of my
profession does his work. My inclination to justify the labors and
sentiments of an often misunderstood body of men was lately reinforced
by remarks made to me by a very intelligent pat