re, fallen into decay,
invalidism, and "nervous prostration." Bringing this subject before
several experienced persons, teachers, and one a physician, in the light
in which I have aimed to bring it before my readers, I have asked, "And
were these cases of invalidism (cases of which we have been speaking)
from your best scholars? Were they, in short, persons still continuing
to grow?" Stopping a moment to think, they have, in two instances at
least, given precisely the same answer: "I never thought of that before,
but they were not."

There are some other things that characterized methods, of study in
those academies of forty or fifty years ago, that may instruct us. While
the girls studied harder, had more recitations, extending through more
hours in a day than are required in any of our High schools, they seldom
studied in school, but at their homes or at their boarding places. This
gave them freedom of position, liberty to sit or stand or walk, when
they were at work on a difficult problem, or engaged in close
thinking--an advantage which any one who has been a close student in
later life, must appreciate--an advantage which I have recently heard
young ladies in our university say, they could hardly conceive of before
they went to the university from the high school where they fitted. This
also led them almost every hour into the open air, and to take a little
exercise, as the girls in our university and in some of our colleges
are forced to do, effecting a visible and marked improvement in the
standard of health among the girls in the university above that of the
girls in the High schools.

Again, they had seldom more than one flight of stairs to climb; nor were
they, in climbing these, burdened with skirts that weigh five, six, and
even seven pounds, such as I know from actual weight, carefully
reported, young girls of the present time sometimes wear in climbing
three immense flights of stairs! Let any woman undertake this with her
arms full of books, her hands tied in holding them, so that she cannot
clear her feet from her long, heavy skirt, with its manifold flounces
switching about them, while she is laboring to lift them with a movement
of her hips and pinioned arms, and yet feels herself liable every
instant to be thrown from her balance by all this encumbrance--let her
undertake this, and she will learn that there is something besides study
that is endangering the health of our school girls. Again, let her t