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It should be said: 2. Almost every fact brought forward by Dr. Clarke goes to illustrate the exact opposite of his almost every conclusion in respect to the effect of mental labor upon the female physique. With the serene, not to say dogmatic conviction of the physician whose own patients represent the world to him, he has copied for us from his note-books a series of cases exemplifying the remarkable unanimity with which girls, after leaving school, break down in health. Overlooking the blunder which he made about the student from Vassar College, which has been so carefully pointed out by Colonel Higginson (I refer to Dr. Clarke's implicit and unhesitating acceptance and publication of statements made by the student, which the faculty of the college have since altogether denied); not pausing to discuss the spirit which grasps at uninvestigated testimony like this, -- run the eye over his illustrations, and what have we?

With an affluent accompaniment of office detail so evidently necessary to the public discussion of an educational topic, and so unlikely to attract a purely irrelevant and unworthy attention to the circulation of the essay that one cannot fail to note the author's generosity in this particular, he calls our consideration to his list of cases, arguing detachedly, by the way, and ingeniously constructing for our benefit very much such a syllogism as this.

Sumption. -- All women ought to be incapable of sustained activity.

Subsumption. -- Some women whom I have known are incapable of sustained activity. Miss X. became an invalid soon after leaving school. Miss Y. was injured by gymnastic exercises, fell under my care, and will never be well. Miss Z. became an invalid soon after leaving school, and being for some time under my treatment was sent to an insane asylum.

Therefore,

Conclusion: All women are incapable of. sustained activity, but proved especially incapable of sustained brain activity; and, since it would cost Harvard College several millions of dollars to admit them, co-education is a chimera, and old maids a monstrosity at which physicians may sneer, and by which young women should take warning.

Or, to put it in another form, more compactly,

As long as girls are in school they are (with exceptions so rare that I have had great difficulty in finding them) in excellent health.

When girl's leave school, they fall sick.

Therefore it is sustained study which injures girls.

Here, now, is the point of fair dispute. Why do girls so often become invalids within a few years after leaving school? The fact is a familiar one. We nee4ed no Dr. Clarke come from their graves to tell us this. We are well accustomed to the sight of a fresh young girl, a close student, a fine achiever, "sustained "in mental application, and as healthy in body as she is vigorous and aspiring in brain, sinking, after a period of out-of-school life, into an aching, ailing, moping creature, aimless in the spirit and useless in the flesh for any of life's higher purposes, with which her young soul was filled and fired a little while ago.

"You may be well enough now. Wait till you are twenty four or five. That is the age when girls break down." This is the doleful prophecy of friends and physicians cast cold on the warm hopes of our hard-working, ambitious girls. "It is because you keep late hours, dance too much, eat indigestible food, or exercise too little," says the hygienist. "It is because you wear corsets, long skirts, and chignons," says the dress reformer. "It is because you are a woman. Here is a mystery I "says the dunce. "It is because you study too much," says Dr. Clarke.

Who of us has yet suggested and enforced the suggestion of another reason more simple and comprehensive than any of these, -- more probable, perhaps, than any which could be found outside of the effects of female dress?

Women sick because they study? Does it not look a little more as if women were sick because they stopped studying?

Worn out by intellectual activity?

Let us suppose that they might be exhausted by the change from intellectual activity to intellectual inanition. Made invalids because they go to school from fourteen to eighteen? Let us conceive that they might be made invalids because they left school at eighteen! Let us draw upon our imagination to the extent of inquiring whether the nineteenth-century girl -- intense, sensitive, and developing, like her age, nervously and fast -- might not be made an invalid by the plunge from the "healing influences" of systematic brain exertion to the broken, jagged life which awaits a girl whose "education is completed." Made an invalid by exchanging the wholesome pursuit of sufficient and worthy aims for the unrelieved routine of a dependent domestic life, from which all aim has departed, or for the whirl of false excitements and falser contents which she calls society. Made an invalid by the abrupt slide from "thinking," as poor Lamb had it, "that life was going to be something," to the discovery that it has "unaccountably fallen from her before its time." Made an invalid by the sad and subtle process by which a girl is first inspired to the ideal of a life in which her personal culture has as honest and honorable a part of her regard as (and as a part of) her personal usefulness; and then is left to find out that personal culture substantially stopped for her when she tied the ribbon of her seminary diploma.