open to young men and to young women on the
same terms. There are no separate roads for the sexes up the Hill of
Science, from the lowest primary, to the highest professional school.
Kalamazoo College, against the opinion of many educated and educational
men, admitted women to a full curriculum, twenty years ago. And classes,
about equally divided, have been graduating from the college ever since,
confirming the authors of the movement and the whole Faculty, during
these twenty years, in the practicability and the many advantages of the
plan. The young women have always averaged as good scholarship and
health as the young men. A _smaller_ number of women than [Transcriber's
Note: missing word "men"? ]have abandoned their course on account of ill
health. During the period of my own connection with this institution, many
young women pursued there an extended elective course of study, who did not
graduate. It was not their plan to do so when they entered the
preparatory department. Many graduated from a course quite as extensive,
requiring as persistent study, though not in all respects like that of
the young men. They did not usually study Greek, though some did, and
were leaders of their classes. They did not pursue Latin quite so far,
but more than made up for this in a far more thorough study of French
and German, History and Literature. There is scarcely a week in the year
but I receive communications in some way from some of these old pupils.
They are among my most enjoyable, intellectual, and literary
correspondents. With few exceptions, they are _growing_ women. Having
learned how to learn--which they will all remember, was the most I ever
professed to be able to teach them--they have instituted schools for
themselves, compelled sometimes very hard circumstances to become their
best teachers, and learned to draw lessons, as Mr. Emerson once said in
a lecture to them, from "frost and fire."

Some have learned to use the world as not abusing it, and are turning
wealth and its advantages that have come to them, to useful, noble
purposes. A few, but very few, of the large number, are invalids, but
there is not one whose case does not furnish me with abundant evidence
of many more probable causes of invalidism, than over-study. There is
not one, of whom I have heard, whose case does not wear on the face of
it decidedly other causes than "persistent study."

Dr. Mahan, who was the first, and for fifteen years, President