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It may occur to some that the assumed identity of the intellectual education given to girls and boys in America may have less to do with the ill-health of the former than the dissimilarity of their physical training. Boys are much in the open air. Girls are much in the house. Boys wear a dress which follows and allows their natural movements. Girls wear clothes which impede and almost paralyze their limbs. Boys have, moreover, the healthful hope held out to them of being able to pursue their own objects, and to choose and follow the business or profession of their choice. Girls have the dispiriting prospect of a secondary and derivative existence, with only so much room allowed them as may not cramp the full sweep of the other sex. The circumstances first named directly affect health, the last exerts a strong reflex action upon it. "We are only women, and it does not matter," passes from mother to daughter. A very estimable young lady said to me the other day, in answer to a plea for dress-reform, "It is better to look handsome, even if it does shorten life a little." Her care of herself probably does not go beyond that indicated by this saying. Dr. Clarke cites a few instances of functional derangement. But by far the most frequent difficulty with our women arises from uterine displacement, and this in turn comes partly from the utter disuse of the muscles which should keep the uterus in place, but which are kept inactive by the corset, weighed upon by the heavy skirt, and drawn upon by the violent and unnatural motion of the dancing at present in vogue. Is it any wonder that these ill-educated, over-burthened muscles give way, like other ill-trained, over-powered things? Some instances of remarkable robustness in women have been the result of a physical education identical with that usually given to boys. In these cases, the parents, after repeated losses of children through much cherishing, have at last determined to give the girls a chance through athletic sports and unrestricted exercise in the open air. And this has again and again proved successful.

Much in Dr. Clarke's treatment of his subject is objectionable. We are left in doubt whether his book was written for men or for women, and we conclude that his method of statement is not good for either. Much of his remarking upon sex is justly offensive, and his statements concerning those single women of culture whom he terms agenes would scarcely be endured in any household in which these single saints bear the burthens of all the others, and lead lives divinely wedded to duty. The odious expression which completes his picture of "the girls tied to their dictionaries," &c., would exclude the book, and the writer too, from some pure and polite circles. And we must say to him, with all due regard for the good intentions with which we desire to credit him, --

"These things must not be thought of on this wise."

I have thus attempted a brief addition to the comments of women upon Dr. Clarke's work, telling pretty plainly what I think of it, and why. But a full discussion of these great themes of Sex and Education can hardly be had in answer to a summons so sharp and so partial as his own. Not to dogmatize and counter-dogmatize upon these points will make either men or women wiser. Not for those who think they know every thing about the matter to diicourse to those whom they judge as knowing nothing about it.

These processes will always retard instead of advancing the discovery of truth. But when men and women may meet together for fair and equal interchange of thought, the men not wanting in modesty, nor the women in courage, then we shall be glad to listen, if we do not speak. And if we do speak, we shall say, "Father, thou hast made all things well, and without thy wisdom was not any thing made that was made."

II.

BY THOS. WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.

THOSE who are anxiously studying the problem of the Education of Women may be trusted to read with eager interest this little book by Dr. Clarke. The author takes pains to recognize the intellectual ability of women; and he puts on record a most valuable and emphatic denial, from his own professional experience, of the common assertion that American women habitually desire to escape the duties of wifehood and motherhood. I should not call the book generally coarse, but very needlessly rough and plainspoken, especially for a book destined to popular perusal; and the author certainly touches the verge of coarseness in his description of a possible sexless woman. He, however, indulges in no unfair fling against the advocates of the equality of the sexes, except as far as is contained in the following sentences: "Woman seems to be looking up to man and his development, as the goal and ideal of womanhood. The new gospel of female development glorifies what she possesses in common with him, and tramples under her feet as a source of weakness and badge of inferiority the mechanism and functions peculiar to herself." (p. 129.) If this is intended to describe the "gospel "proclaimed by the "Woman's Journal," for instance, there is not a number of the paper, from the beginning, which does not contain the material wherewith to refute the statement. And that it is not true of the agitation in America, as a whole, is shown by the fact that this movement has been constantly under criticism from European and Roman Catholic sources, for precisely the opposite tendency; that is, for encouraging the study of physiology in schools, and for thus making young girls too well acquainted with those special laws of their own being, about which they were once studiously kept in ignorance. The two charges, destroy each other: both cannot be true, and I think that neither is. Certainly the strongest arguments in favor of Woman Suffrage are based not on the identity, but on. the difference of the sexes.