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Assume that each girl student must rest entirely from brain-work three days out of every thirty, and the average of work could be easily brought up by a little exercise of common sense on the part of teacher and pupil. But it is not to be assumed that every girl, or that one girl out of ten, must rest three days, or even one day, out of thirty. Not unfrequently girls who afterwards developed into sound, healthy matrons, standing the wear and tear of life in a manner to astonish vigorous men hardly able to hold their own in the rush of our American life, have been known to attend, without a single exception, every recitation of their classes for years, even when going daily from quite a distance to school or college. A moderate and regular use of the mental faculties, such as should alone be permitted in our schools and colleges, with ample margins each week for the exigencies of life for both sexes, has been again and again proved to be conducive to the highest physical health for women as well as men.

A few years ago a young girl of sixteen, who had left school under a physician's advice, because of certain irregularities in her physical health, was rapidly passing into such a state of apathy to things ordinarily attractive to the young, that wise friends feared the result of insanity. As a last resort, she was placed in a school where, amid pleasant companionship, her faculties were gently though regularly stimulated. She soon began to revive under a regimen of mathematics, languages, and art-culture, and in two years was in a state of perfect health. During these entire two years she was not absent from school more than three times, nor did she ever fail to prepare a lesson. Here regularity of study was not a source of disease, but, apparently, its cure.

But the instances in point, thronging the mind of the writer, would tax the patience of the reader unjustifiably. Passing over those omissions and oversights in the book, so happily specified in notices like that of the "Advertiser" and the "Liberal Christian," a few words more must close this already too long reference to this timely and, in many respects, valuable essay.

The evil to which our wise and kind physician, refers, is surely not to be overlooked. It exists; it stares at us from early graves, and, far worse, from homes whose central figures are afflicted with life-long sufferings before which the stoutest-hearted men night quail.

What is its remedy? Does our earnest hearted friend propose one which the exigencies of life will permit women to adopt? Has any writer suggested a cure for this menacing ill?

If a warning trumpet is to be blown, shall no one be found to herald also the hope of better things?

Let a woman's voice be heard pleading, not for less work or less constant work, but for a wiser method of work in our schools! Let a ban be put upon public exhibitions of both boys and girls in schools! Let the worry arising from a false system of marks for recitations, and from all comparisons and competitions, be banished forever! Let the notion that girls must recite all their lessons while standing vanish from the minds of both teachers and physicians! The use of the feet is not essential to a good translation from Homer or Goethe; and even the Calculus has been mastered by students who, for the most part, sat at recitations. Let evening parties, and the various forms of tempting amusements which beset our young people while attending to the serious work of their education, be as strictly forbidden to them as they are to their infant brothers and sisters yet in the nursery! Let the tyrannous fashion-plate be consulted less than the laws of harmonious coloring and real fitness of contour!

Above all, let the beginnings be right! Remember that far more valuable work can be done for the education of any human being, and especially of a girl, by reason of her threefold nature, between the ages of seven and fourteen than between fourteen and nineteen. Let our girls remain girls till they have reached the estate of womanhood. Let their development be gradual and normal, not forced and spasmodic; and we shall have no hothouse flowers to fade and die at the first touch of the ruder air of real life, but blossoms that are the pledge of coming fruit.

It would be unjust and ungrateful in any woman not to recognize the, fact that Dr. Clarke's book was necessarily written in haste, in hours snatched from his absorbing labors in alleviating the sufferings of those for whose good he wrote. It was doubtless this haste that rendered possible such a verbal error as occurs on page 35, where he hides the venerable Ulysses, instead of the youthful Achilles, among the maidens.

In conclusion, we would insist not only that the diseases so often referred to do not originate generally in the schools, but that the only way in which they can be reached and cured is through the instruction imparted and the regularity of life, in all its details, required by wisely conducted schools, covering the whole period from early girlhood to full maturity.