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By his logic the girls in fashionable private schools, where the discipline is supposed to be more lax, the course of study more flexible, and the standard lower, should have better health than the girls in the public schools. Is it true that they have?

Teachers of fashionable private schools for girls in Boston to-day know that their pupils, so far from studying harder than they themselves did twenty-five years ago, study less. The hours of the school session are fewer, and much less time is granted for study out of school. They know, too, that the absences excused by sickness are far in excess of those of their own school-days. Looking, therefore, for some other cause than increased -- brain-work, for this degeneracy in the health of girls, they easily find it in the increased luxury and irregularity of their home life.

Teachers of long experience testify that the health of studious girls is better than that of the lazy ones, because their minds are occupied happily, and being also regularly occupied acquire a habit of concentration that is stability and strength for mind and body. The involuntary testimony of many a school-girl goes far to confirm this.

Sadder even than the bloodless skin and intellectual face of the normal-school girl is the not uncommon spectacle of the bloodless skin and unintellectual face of the girl in our fashionable private schools, whose mind has become so enervated by parental indulgence, so demoralized by constant social excitement; that, to use her own words, "the sight of a book makes her head ache."

If we could make it impossible for little girls of eight to solemnize paper-doll weddings, from which the precocious guests, after refreshing themselves with lobster salad and candies, roll home in their carriages at ten at night; if we could prevent the participation of their older sisters in private theatricals and the German, during the regular school-work of the year; if the education of girls could be at least so far identical with that of boys that we could oppose common sense and physiological reasons to that absurd dictum of society which now thrusts girls of eighteen out of the school-room and into the matrimonial market, while their brothers of the same age are considered as mere lads and just beginning their education; if we could take care that they are not overburdened with domestic responsibility as their brothers never are, and, instead of restricting their regular routine of school-work to the period between eight and eighteen, could extend it to the age of twenty- four, like that of their college brothers who study a profession, -- the girls would have the fair chance which they now lack, both for physical and mental development.

Meantime let the well girls, and there are hundreds of them, though of course not within the Doctor's range of vision, aim for the highest intellectual culture, not deterred by the fear of being stigmatized as agenes.

Can any woman read this book without feeling depressed, crushed by this cosmic law of periodicity which is to exempt her from nothing, but only to debar her from a higher education? For the Doctor declares that "female operatives of all sorts are likely to suffer less, and actually do suffer less, from persistent work than female students, . . . because the former work their brains less." The regimen prescribed by the Doctor has so few attractions, the reward he offers is so paltry. We are to remember that "the glory of the lily is one, and the glory of the oak another." If we "pass middle life without the symmetry and development that maternity gives," we are taunted with the "hermaphroditic condition that sometimes accompanies spinsterism." We are not allowed to believe, with Alger, that "the qualities of our soul and the fruitions of our life may be perfected in spite of the relative mutilation in our lot." We are to "give girls a fair chance for physical development at school, and they will be able in after life, with reasonable care of themselves, to answer the demands made upon them." That is the summary.

Whether intentionally or not, this book panders to that sentiment of fashionable society that declares it unnecessary for girls to know any thing but to make themselves attractive, and, what is still more to be regretted, it will tend to increase the selfishness and the imaginary invalidism so prevalent among girls and women who have nothing better in life to do than to think of themselves.

The "wisely anxious" mothers do not need it, and the injudicious mothers, who wish to make the schools responsible for their own constant violation of the simplest hygienic laws in the management of their daughters, confirmed in their weakness by Dr. Clarke's leniency towards their social sins, will eagerly seize upon it as a weapon of attack.

It is easy enough to make vague and arbitrary assertions, and to point them with cruel gibes, -- far easier than to prove them false. It is easy enough to meet sneer with sneer, and to animadvert upon such assertions with a certain piquancy. But neither the assertion nor the animadversion amounts to any thing without facts to support it.