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That a student should faint again and again in the gymnasium, and still be pushed to continue her exercises there, is a statement that would not be made by any one who knows the personal physical care that is had here, not only by the Resident Physician, but by all the teachers. It is a statement that will be believed by none who has taken any pains to inform himself of the methods of training adopted by Vassar College.

It is possible that a student began here to menstruate healthily, and ended her course a victim of dysmenorrhoea; but does it give "a fair chance for the girls "to argue therefrom that the functional disturbance was the result of too severe or continued study? Do you know that she pursued a healthful regimen in every other respect? As an offset to this side of the story, I can give you a hundred cases in which dysmenorrhoea of long standing and aggravated character has been cured here, -- cured mainly, as I believe, by patient persistence in the regular habits of mental and physical life that here obtain.

We do not attempt to cut down the work of each girl every fourth week, but we do mean so to regulate the work of the whole time that the end of no day shall find her overtaxed, even if that day has borne the added periodic burden. It is our aim so to combine opportunity for serious mental activity with physical training and individual freedom from tiresome restraint or hint of espionage, that vigor of head and heart and body will be the happy result. As a rule, we succeed; the success varying of course with the stuff we have to work with.

The average age of the graduates of Vassar College is twenty-one and a half.

Too young, I grant you; and we hope to improve on it as the years go, and knowledge, physiological and otherwise liberal, increases.

Eighteen is young enough for any woman to begin this course. At that age, with average endowment of mind and body, she pursues it with gladness and ends it with rejoicing, as can be proved by a goodly number of Vassar's alumnae.

Hoping that your sense of justice will suggest methods by which the erroneous impressions that your book conveys concerning Vassar College may be, as far as possible, corrected,

I am, sir,
Respectfully yours,
ALIDA C. AVERY.
VASSAR COLLEGE, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.,
Nov. 4, 1873.

ANTIOCH COLLEGE.. . .

All the time I was at Antioch College I never heard of a young lady in the college requiring a physician's advice. Among the seven girls in my class I never remember an instance of illness: they were always at recitations, and always had their lessons. I spent four years at Antioch, -- two at the theological school; and I have been over ten years a settled pastor, and I never yet was absent from an engagement or suspended labor on account of sickness. When in Kansas, I spoke every day from the first of July to the fifth of November, besides travelling to my appointments each day, some days giving two lectures and preaching Sundays, making in all two hundred and five speeches, averaging more than an hour in length, and came home just as well as I went and this moment I am as well as ever, and could walk ten miles in a day with ease. To me such statements as Dr. Clarke's seem absurd, and contrary to everybody's experience. . . .

The ill-health of the women of our time is not due to study or regularity in study: it is due to the want of regularity, and want of aim and purpose, and want of discipline. If you should tale the whole number of women in this country who have graduated from a regular college with men, and place them side by side with the same number of women who have not had that course of study, select them where you will, the college graduates will be stronger in mind and body, able to endure more and work harder than the others. This I am sure of, as I am acquainted with many of the somewhat small number of women graduates; and I know something of other women, having belonged to various female seminaries at different times.

-- Rev. Olympia Brown.

MICHIGAN UNIVERSITY.

ABOUT eighty of the students are of the sex which some call "weaker," but which here, at any rate, is shown to be equal in endurance, in courage, in perseverance, in devotion to study, and In cheerful confidence, to the strong and stalwart men. The health of the women who are here now is in almost every instance excellent. I am assured by intelligent ladies in all the departments that there is not a single instance of sickness which has come from over-study, or from any cause connected with the routine of the college life. In one or two cases, the inconvenience of a weak constitution, of weak eyes and sensitive nerves, has been felt; and one of the most vigorous of the sisters has been confined to her chamber for some weeks by a sprained ankle. But it is the unanimous testimony, as I learn, of the ladies who are studying law, and medicine, and science, and the arts, in the class-rooms, and lecture-rooms, and library, and laboratory, that their health was never better, that they have had no attacks of malady, and that they ask for no indulgence on account of their sex. Most of them, indeed, are out of their teens, and beyond the age to which the warnings of Dr. Clarke's book apply. But, of the twenty or more whom I personally know, not one complains; and they look to be in better health than the average of young women.