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ion. I most honestly believe that the woman is the better in mind and morals for the larger training, better if she marries, and far better and happier if it chances that she does not. If we take the mass of girls, even of mature age, and give them the training commonly given to men, they run, I think, grave risks of being injured by it, and in larger proportion than do their brothers. Where it seems for other reasons desirable, it should be, I think, a question of individual selection. The majority of healthy young women ought to be able to bear the strain. Once in a female college, the woman goes on, and it is my own experience that, on the whole, she exhibits a far larger list of disastrous results from such work than do young men. If she be in the least degree nervous or not well, I, for one, should resolutely say no to all such claims; for let us bear in mind that the higher education is rarely to be used as men use it, to some definite end, and is therefore not, on the whole, so essential to her as to him. Few women mean it as a way towards medicine, or even the upper ranks of teaching; and if they do, the least doubt as to health ought to make us especially unwilling to start an unseaworthy or uninsurable vessel upon an ocean of perilous possibilities. I wish that every woman could attain to the best that men have. I wish for her whatever in the loftiest training helps to make her as mother more capable, as wife more helpful; but I would on no account let the healthiest woman thus task her brain until she is at least nineteen. If she is to marry, and this puts it off until twenty-three, I consider that a gain not counted by the advocates of the higher education. I leave to others to survey the broad question of whether or not it will be well for the community that the mass of women should have a collegiate training. It is a wide and wrathful question, and has of late been very well discussed in Romanes's paper, and by Mrs. Lynn Linton. I think the conclusions of the former, on the whole, are just; but now, whatever be my views as to the larger interests of the commonwealth and the future mothers of our race, I must not forget that I am giving, or trying to give, what I may call individualized advice, from the physician's view, as to what is wisest. Let us suppose that circumstances make it seem proper to consider an ambitious young woman's wish, and to let her go to a college for women. We presume that she has av
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