ue_ is of
little worth, since its descendants will die out in a generation or two;
and conversely that a good _physique_, however poor the accompanying
mental endowments, is worth preserving, because, throughout future
generations, the mental endowments may be indefinitely developed; we
perceive how important is the balance of instincts above described. But,
advantage apart, the instincts being thus balanced, it is folly to
persist in a system which undermines a girl's constitution that it may
overload her memory. Educate as highly as possible--the higher the
better--providing no bodily injury is entailed (and we may remark, in
passing, that a sufficiently high standard might be reached were the
parrot-faculty cultivated less, and the human faculty more, and were the
discipline extended over that now wasted period between leaving school
and being married). But to educate in such manner, or to such extent, as
to produce physical degeneracy, is to defeat the chief end for which the
toil and cost and anxiety are submitted to. By subjecting their
daughters to this high-pressure system, parents frequently ruin their
prospects in life. Besides inflicting on them enfeebled health, with all
its pains and disabilities and gloom; they not unfrequently doom them to
celibacy.

* * * * *

The physical education of children is thus, in various ways, seriously
faulty. It errs in deficient feeding; in deficient clothing; in
deficient exercise (among girls at least); and in excessive mental
application. Considering the regime as a whole, its tendency is too
exacting: it asks too much and gives too little. In the extent to which
it taxes the vital energies, it makes the juvenile life far more like
the adult life than it should be. It overlooks the truth that, as in the
foetus the entire vitality is expended in growth--as in the infant,
the expenditure of vitality in growth is so great as to leave extremely
little for either physical or mental action; so throughout childhood and
youth, growth is the dominant requirement to which all others must be
subordinated: a requirement which dictates the giving of much and the
taking away of little--a requirement which, therefore, restricts the
exertion of body and mind in proportion to the rapidity of growth--a
requirement which permits the mental and physical activities to increase
only as fast as the rate of growth diminishes.

The _rationale_ of this high-pressu