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This physiological scare is the most insidious form under which the opposition to the higher education of woman has yet appeared. I speak advisedly; for, though this book professes to be a protest against the co-education of the sexes, and even against their separate identical education, I think it will be felt by the careful reader to be a protest against any high intellectual education for women.

While the author claims to use the term education only in its broadest sense as "the drawing out and development of every part of the system," including necessarily the whole manner of life physical and psychical during the educational period, it will be seen that he lays stress only upon the physical education of girls, and upon their physical education only as it is connected with the duties of maternity, Nowhere does he hold out to the girls the promise that, if they will carefully obey his injunctions during the critical period of their lives, they can with safety, and may with propriety, seek a higher mental culture. Nowhere does he urge them finally to demand the highest mental culture, as he insists that they shall have the highest physical culture, as their birthright.

Moreover, that regimen which precludes the regular attendance of girls upon school, between the ages of fourteen and nineteen, virtually robs them of any extended course of study, since before the end of that period their so-called duties to society are thrust upon them.

Is it fair, in contrasting the ruddy cheeks and vigor of the English girl with the pallor and weakness of the American girl, to attribute the latter largely to the educational methods of our schools, and to credit nothing of the former to the simple domestic life of the English girl?

Let us "emphasize and reiterate until it is heeded" Dr. Clarke's statement that "woman's neglect of her own organization adds to the number of her many weaknesses, and intensifies their power." Let us reflect awhile before we accept his statement that "the educational methods of our schools are, to a large extent, the causes of the thousand ills that beset American women."

"Girls of bloodless skins and intellectual faces," he says, "may be seen any day, by those who desire the spectacle, among the scholars of our high and normal schools; faces that crown, and skins that cover, curving spines which should be straight, and neuralgic nerves that should know no pain. . . . A training that yields this result is neither fair to the girls nor to the race."

Are bloodless female faces to be found only among the scholars of our high and normal schools?

When found there, what effort has Dr. Clarke made to ascertain how much of their bloodlessness is due to brain labor? Does he know any thing of the home life of these girls? Is it not just possible that they may have been defrauded of their childhood, -- that in what is technically and prettily called helping their mothers, lifting and carrying baby, &c., their poor curved spines may have got a twist long before they had won admission to the high school?

Are there no bloodless faces among the sewing girls who do not stand at their work, whose work is neither brain-work nor severe manual labor, but that most often quoted to us as the most suitable feminine occupation?

"The number of these graduates who have been permanently disabled, to a greater or less degree, by these causes, is so great as to excite the greatest alarm," says Dr. Clarke. Will he give us the exact number, so that we need not underrate or overrate the danger? and, if it can be proved that two out of every five of these wrecks to which he sadly points, were stranded on another shore than that of a sustained course of mental work, it will tend to quiet the alarm.

I do not wish to put out of sight the doctor's explicit declaration that "our school methods are not the sole causes of female weakness." He admits that "an immense loss of female power may be fairly charged" to certain delinquencies of dress and diet; yet he as distinctly adds that, "after the amplest allowance for these, there remains a large margin of disease unaccounted for; "that "the grievous maladies that torture a woman's earthly existence are indirectly affected by food, clothes, and exercise; they are directly and largely affected by the methods of education in our schools." Furthermore, he makes no demand that girls shall be as carefully protected from physical strain and from mental excitement in their social life at critical periods as he does that they shall be protected from the excitements of study. A paper that, after claiming to treat upon education as "including the whole manner of life," declares the discussion of dress and similar causes of female weakness is not within its scope; that mentions these casually as indirect causes, and is silent concerning the social excitements of girls, which every teacher feels to be a fruitful source of disease, directing its arguments mainly against their mental training, -- does not seem to me to be written wholly in the interest of the girls. The writer leaves the impression, and he means to leave the impression, that the regimen of the schools, if not the sole cause, is the prime and direct cause of the ill-health of American women. When he gives us statistics showing that the girls injured by co-education or by separate identical education outnumber the girls diseased by excessive muscle work, excessive mental idleness, or excessive social dissipation, it will not be necessary for him to plead the poverty of Harvard College in support of his theory.