of
Oberlin College, has since been for nearly as long a period the
President of Adrian College, in this State. He says that, during his
connection with Oberlin, the proportion of young men to young women who
entered upon the course, and failed to complete it on account of failure
of health, under the strain of thought and study, was at least _two to
one_. The proportion was not quite so great in Adrian; but many more
young men than young women--and, as far as he was acquainted with
colleges, everywhere--succumbed under the change from their former life
to one of study.

Dr. Mahan also says that, owing to the peculiar circumstances under
which Oberlin College was established, he has, through subsequent years,
maintained a far more familiar acquaintance with his former students
than is common for old teachers to do; and that he can count many more
broken-down men, among his old graduates, than broken-down women. It
would be impossible for one now to conceive the obstacles in the way of
the girls who were first admitted to study at Oberlin. Every step was
achieved through a moral battle with public opinion and popular
prejudice, the depressing effects of which cannot now be estimated. And
yet they did go through--stood as high during their whole course, and in
their graduating exercises, as the young men. They are all of them
married, mothers of families of children, and are strong and healthy,
far above the average of American women.

During almost thirty years that he has been president of college faculty
meetings, he has never _once_ heard, from any member of the Faculty, any
intimation that the girls in the class were in any way whatever a drag
upon the class. They invariably keep up, and oftener come out ahead than
they lag behind. Nor is this more characteristic in one branch of study
than another. Languages, science, philosophy, they grasp as clearly,
strongly, and comprehensively as men; and as the result of his
observation and of his experience, which, he says, in co-education in a
higher course of study, has perhaps been greater than that of any man in
the world, he thinks that while it is just as much better for men to be
so educated as it is for women, the result to the latter is to make them
more practical, more natural, less given to effeminate, rather than
feminine affectations, and more readily adaptive to anything life may
demand of them than any class of women he has ever known. Also, in the
particular