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The defects in the present system of education are so great that it is no wonder physicians can hardly find words strong enough for denunciation of them, especially great in the education of girls. Children of both sexes have too many studies; they are crowded and hurried; they do very little really hard brain-work, but their brains are bewildered; they have a sort of mental indigestion all the time; and this kind of crowding and driving is exciting and exhausting to the nerves, and injurious to every portion of the organism. Boys have some offset to it: they have an easy dress, short hair, and can exercise freely out of schools; but that even their training is not the best is shown by the innumerable invalids, imbeciles, and insane among men. With girls, especially city girls, the matter is worse. They cannot race and play and frolic on the common or in the streets; they wear tight boots, burdensome clothes, not tight but cumbersome masses of their own or false hair on the head, that should be cool and free; they eat unwholesome food; dance at hot parties; saunter along the pavements, with arms à la mode; go to dancing school and skating parties without the faintest regard to physiology or to the plain rules of health; have music lessons and masters; and in too many cases lead a life of reckless waste that it makes a grown person breathless to think of. No wonder they break down, no wonder they have all those miserable polysyllabic diseases that decently trained women never heard of; but we believe that the class who have these diseases because of "sustained regularity" in study is so small that it should hardly be reckoned in the account, but should be treated as exceptional, like the blind or the physically deformed. It is almost impossible for even a physician to discover in the case of young invalids how much really hard and injurious study has been done. The imprudences, wilful or ignorant, of girls, are innumerable, and only when driven to the last extreme will they confess them. If the evil resulting from bad diet, late and irregular hours, improper clothing, exposure to cold and dampness, hereditary weakness, and exciting reading, could be eliminated, we believe there would be no difficulty whatever in raising a generation of strong and noble girls under the system of "sustained regularity" of study.

There is something to be said from the side of health. All women are not sick, and the experience of health teaches that girls and boys should have a very large margin for repair of waste and for growth, -- girls, perhaps, a larger margin than boys, although we are by no means sure of that. Nature is a wise worker, and distributes the repair and growth wherever it is needed, to the dual organism of the boy or to the tripartite one of the girl. With simple, healthful habits of life, with proper diet, abundant sleep, plenty of sunshine and play, and moderate, regular study, in school or out, girls, unless they inherited some disease, would stand a fair chance for health, strength, and development as women.

Indeed, we believe the sustained regularity of moderate study to be better for the health of the average girl than any periodicity of study. Girls educated in this way, with wise regard to the general principles of health, are not likely to indulge in what Dr. Clarke calls cerebral pyrotechnics at school examinations; but they are likely to grow up intelligent women, with good common sense, who, if fate throws them into the whirl of city life, will set their faces against its overwhelming excitements, and seek peaceful hours at home as the weight and balance-wheel of life; and, if they live in the country, make happy homes there. Many of them will be, as women so educated now are, mothers and grandmothers; some will probably be childless wives, and some will never marry, but none of them will ever deserve the bitter sneer with which Dr. Clarke speaks of torsos and of the "hermaphroditic condition that sometimes accompanies spinsterism."

If the ruinous work of women, their standing in shops and at desks, could be stopped if children between ten and sixteen were not allowed to serve in shops, if no woman under twenty were allowed to teach in a public school; if girls were taught obedience and truth-telling, and if mothers were wisely anxious, -- that is Dr. Clarke's expression, and goes to the root of the matter, -- wisely anxious about their daughters, caring for their health more than for their appearance, for their permanent good more than their present indulgence, looking after their reading and their pleasures, guarding them from imprudence and making them take care of their own health, there would be no trouble about regular study. The same causes that dry up the youth and strength of young girls break down older ones, -- constant excitement and no real rest, social excitement at parties; passionate excitement at operas and theatres; emotional excitement over highly wrought novels and philanthropic work; one following close on the other, and all accompanied by bodily fatigue and endless hurry. It is a sad life to look at, in spite of the seeming beauty of the garments of art, culture, and charity which it wears. If Dr. Clarke's warning will waken people to their danger, and make them lead simpler and easier lives; if he can make them follow the plainest rules of health; if he can do any thing toward keeping girls girls, instead of having them forced, when they are hardly in their teens, into diminutive fashionable women, with a smattering of forty studies and a knowledge of none, -- he will be indeed a Good Physician, and his aim will be won without taking girls out of school or interfering with their regular work, without even discussing the question of co-education. . . .