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And to parents may we not say: Do not longer feel obliged to surrender your daughters, in the very bloom of their youthful powers, to the unintelligent dominion of Fashion. You subject them to the extravagant, immodest rules of display; you expose them to the intercourse of flattery and folly, to the poison of heated and crowded rooms, late hours, and luxurious suppers. You countenance the lavish waste of time, talent, sensibility, and money, and all this because without it your daughters may not marry. And with it, indeed, they may not. Take courage then, and come to a loftier stand. Educate the future wives with the future husbands. Give the two in common the highest enjoyments and the happiest memories. Then shall the marriage wreath crown the pair in its true human dignity, never to be displaced or lost.

J. W. H.

SEX AND EDUCATION.

I.

BY JULIA WARD HOWE.

WHEN a book challenges public attention to its especial object and intention, we may not inappropriately deal with it before we consider its author. As to the book, then, called "Sex in Education," let us endeavor to make up our minds concerning its character, before we pass on to deal with the topics it suggests.

Is the book, then, a work of science, of literature, or of philosophy, or is it a simple practical treatise on the care of health? We should call it none of these. It has neither the impartiality of science, the form of literature, the breadth of philosophy, nor the friendliness of counsel.

It is a work of the polemic type, presenting a persistent and passionate plea against the admission of women to a collegiate education in common with men. The advisableness of such education in common is a question upon which people differ greatly in opinion. So many people of conscience and intelligence hold opposite theories concerning this, that it may be considered as a question fairly open to discussion, and asking to be tested in the light of experience. Dr. Clarke supports his side of the argument by a statement of facts insufficient for his purpose, and by reasonings and inferences irrelevant to the true lesson of these facts. He makes in the first place a strange confusion between things present, past, and future, and in the terror of the identical education to come sees identical education of the sexes in the past and present as the cause of all the ills that female flesh is heir to. He asserts the fact of an ascertained and ever increasing deterioration in the persons of American women from the true womanly standard. He finds them tending ever more and more towards a monstrous type, sterile and sexless; and these facts, which some of us may strongly doubt, he considers accounted for by he corresponding fact that boys and girls receive the same intellectual education. According to him, you cannot feed a woman's brain without starving her body. Brain and body are set in antagonism over against each other, and what is one organ's meat is another's poison. Single women of the intellectual type he characterizes very generally, not only as agamai, but as agenes; and his portraiture of them is sufficiently revolting. The powerful influence of climate is lightly estimated by him. One hundred years would be insufficient to change the stout, heavily boned English or Irish woman, with her abundant covering of flesh, into the wiry, nervous Yankee woman, characterized by nerve and brain. The cause of all this, of the undeveloped busts, fragile figures, and uncertain health of American women, resides in the fact that with us, as he says, girls and boys receive the same education.

The periodical function peculiar to women is a point upon which Dr. Clarke dwells with persistent iteration. Its neglect he considers the principal source of disease among the women of our land. Its repression or over-production are equally fatal to health; and, in the years which nature consecrates to its establishment, the recurrence of the function should be observed by the avoidance of bodily and mental fatigue. Dr. Clarke's reasoning upon this point affirms that American women neglect care in this direction beyond all other women, and that the school education which our girls receive is the moving cause of this neglect.

We cannot remember a single point in Dr. Clarke's diagnosis of American female hygiene which is not included in the present rapid résumé. The Doctor's prognosis is even more dismal and unpromising. Open the doors of your colleges to women, and you will accomplish the ruin of the Commonwealth. Disease -- already, according to him, the rule among them -- will become without exception. Your girls will lose their physical stature, and your boys their mental stature, since the tasks set for the latter would be limited by the periodical disability of the girls. The result will be a physical and sexual chaos, out of which the Doctor sees no escape save in an act akin to the rape of the Sabines. Tennyson's line suits with his mood:

"I will take some savage woman, she shall rear my dusky race."