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Experience teaches that a healthy and growing boy may spend six hours of force daily upon his studies, and leave sufficient margin for physical growth. A girl cannot spend more than four, or, in occasional instances, five hours of force daily upon her studies, and leave sufficient margin for the general physical growth that she must make in common with a boy, and also for constructing a reproductive apparatus. If she puts as much force into her brain education as a boy, the brain or the special apparatus will suffer. Appropriate education and appropriate co-education must adjust their methods and regimen to this law.

Another detail is, that, during every fourth week, there should be a remission, and sometimes an intermission, of both study and exercise. Some individuals require, at that time, a complete intermission from mental and physical effort for a single day; others for two or three days; others require only a remission, and can do half work safely for two or three days, and their usual work after that. The diminished labor, which shall give Nature an opportunity to accomplish her special periodical task and growth, is a physiological necessity for all, however robust they may seem to be. The apportionment of study and exercise to individual needs cannot be decided by general rules, nor can the decision of it be safely left to the pupil's caprice or ambition. Each case must be decided upon its own merits. The organization of studies and instruction must be flexible enough to admit of the periodical and temporary absence of each pupil, without loss of rank, or necessity of making up work, from recitation, and exercise of all sorts. The periodical type of woman's way of work must be harmonized with the persistent type of man's way of work in any successful plan of co-education.

The keen eye and rapid hand of gain, of what Jouffroy calls self-interest well understood, is sometimes quicker than the brain and will of philanthropy to discern and inaugurate reform. An illustration of this statement, and a practical recognition of the physiological method of woman's work, lately came under my observation. There is an establishment in Boston, owned and carried on by a man, in which ten or a dozen girls are constantly employed. Each of them is given and required to take a vacation of three days every fourth week. It is scarcely necessary to say that their sanitary condition is exceptionally good, and that the aggregate yearly amount of work which the owner obtains is greater than when persistent attendance and labor was required. I have never heard of any female school, public or private, in which any such plan has been adopted; nor is it likely that any similar plan will be adopted so long as the community entertain the conviction that a boy's education and a girl's education should be the same, and that the same means the boy's. What is known in England as the Ten-hour Act, which Mr. Mundella and Sir John Lubbock have recently carried through Parliament, is a step in a similar direction. It is an act providing for the special protection of women against over-work. It does not recognize, and probably was not intended to recognize, the periodical type of woman's organization. It is founded on the fact, however, which law has been so slow to acknowledge, that the male and female organization are not identical. (35)

This is not the place for the discussion of these details, and therefore we will not dwell upon them. Our object is rather to show good and imperative reason why they should be discussed by others; to show how faulty and pregnant of ill the education of American girls has been and is, and to demonstrate the truth, that the progress and development of the race depend upon the appropriate, and not upon the identical education of the sexes. Little good will be done in this direction, however, by any advice or argument, by whatever facts supported, or by whatever authority presented, unless the women of our country are themselves convinced of the evils that they have been educated into, and out of which they are determined to educate their daughters. They must breed in them the lofty spirit Wallenstein bade his be of: --