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A number of persons have commented wisely and wittily upon this book and its contents. There is, perhaps, no need of any further detailed criticism of its scope and statement. We have endeavored to give its sense and spirit in little. And we will supplement this synopsis by giving as briefly our own impressions concerning these. To begin with the observance of the periodical function. This is a good old grandmotherly doctrine, handed down from parent to child through all the ages of humanity. Ignorance of the laws of health would, no doubt, in all ages, induce young persons to disregard the cautions of their elders on this as on other points; and the sharp proverb which tells what young people thinly of old people, and what the latter know of the former, must often recur to tie minds of elderly women preaching care and prudence to daughters and nieces. On the whole, if a pretty wide and long personal experience can go for any thing, I incline to think that the elder generation is much more careful of this point of health than of any other. Many young women who are allowed to eat, dress, live, and behave as they like, are periodically kept from all violent exercise and fatigue, so far as the vigilance of elders can accomplish this. The wilfulness and ingenuity of the young, however, are often more than a match for this vigilance; and a single ride on horseback, a single wetting of the feet, or indulgence in the irresistible German, may entail lifelong misery, which the maternal or friendly guardian has done all in her power to prevent. I myself once knew a German lady who, married and childless for many years, confessed to me that a ball attended in her early youth was the cause of this misfortune.

I have known of repeated instances of incurable disease and even of death arising from rides on horseback taken at the critical period. I have known fatal pulmonary consumption to arise from exposure of the feet in silk stockings, at winter parties. Every matron knows and relates these sad facts to the young girls under her charge. They are sometimes heeded, oftener not. Nothing in our knowledge of youth would lead us to consider them as of rare occurrence. And yet Dr. Clarke attributes most failures of the function and its concomitant, maternity, to the school education received by our girls.

The accusation then of systematic neglect of the periodic function by the educators of youth among us cannot be admitted without more evidence than Dr. Clarke has thus far given us. That women in America particularly neglect their health, that women violate the laws of their constitution as men cannot violate theirs, and that the love of intellectual pursuits causes them to do so, -- this is the fable out of which Dr. Clarke draws the moral that women must not go to college with men. Fable and moral appear equally unsubstantial. If Dr. Clarke. had said that the best men and women of the State, the wisest and noblest, should never allow this subject of education to pass out of their minds or out of their care, if he had said that, after worthily receiving education, the first duty of man and woman is to secure it to the succeeding generation, he would have pointed to the true remedy for all that is amiss on this head. The great increase in the study of physiology among us, and especially among women, must tend, we are sure, to a wiser and better self-culture and care of the young. Education is necessarily "line upon line and precept upon precept." The elder generation can only do its best, and trust to the docility and good faith of the young.

The special character of Dr. Clarke's book provokes the question whether he has not unduly specialized facts which are general, and not limited to any coincidence with that which he especially attacks, -- the education of American women, and their physique as affected by it. Is it wholly or principally in America that young women fail of sexual development, have imperfect busts, are afflicted with ill-health and insanity, and in marriage are sterile, or if they have children cannot nurse them?

A well-known sentence of Solomon's shows that even in his time the female form sometimes failed of completeness. Rousseau says of one of the women whom he admired, "et de la gorge comme de ma main," with a general slur upon all women so formed. In Paris has been invented and advertised an artificial bosom warranted to palpitate for a whole evening. It is not likely that this invention has been patented for the exclusive use of American women.

To return to Biblical times, one of the persons healed by our Saviour was a woman suffering from what Dr. Clarke would call menorrlura. It may be as well to remark by the way that during the twelve years of her suffering she had spent all that she had upon physicians, and still was nothing the better, but rather the worse.

Sterility was common in the times both of the Old and of the New Testament. It is common today among the savages of Africa. It is by no means true that the women who themselves show the greatest physical development are always those whose offspring are the most numerous and healthy. Slender women are often more successful mothers and nurses than the stout sisters whose full outlines attest their own robusticity. Even as to the facts of nursing, women with small breasts often have an abundant supply of milk; while women with fuller outward development often have little or none.