evelopment of the
emotional nature. The extravagances of imagination and feeling,
engendered in an idle brain, have much to do with the ill-health of
girls."

In the evidence given by an eminent teacher before the Royal Commission,
in answer to the inquiry whether there was not some danger of injuring
the health of girls between the ages of fourteen and sixteen by hard
study, I find the following: "I think study improves their health very
much. I am sure great harm is often done by hasty recommendation to
throw aside all study, when a temperate and wisely regulated mental diet
is really required. They will not do nothing, but if they have not
wholesome, and proper, and unexciting occupations, they will spend their
time on sensational novels and things much more injurious to health.
Where I have heard complaints about health as being injured by study,
they have proceeded from those who have done least work at college.
Indeed, I do not know of any case of a pupil who has really worked, and
whose health has been injured. We have had complaints in a few cases
where the girls have been decidedly not industrious." In answer to the
inquiry, whether a girl's mind has not a tendency to develop more
rapidly than a boy's mind, and whether, in consequence, there is not
some risk of its being overstrained, the reply is, "decidedly, if the
teacher is not judicious; but supposing that sufficient time is given to
exercise, sleep, and recreation, then there is no danger of its being
overstrained by a teacher who does not give work that the pupil does not
understand. For one girl in the higher middle classes who suffers from
overwork, there are, I believe, hundreds whose health suffers from a
feverish love of excitement, from the irritability produced by idleness,
frivolity, and discontent. I am persuaded, and my experience has been
confirmed by experienced physicians, that _the want of wholesome
occupation lies at the root of the languid debility of which we hear so
much after girls leave school_. I have been considering the question of
health somewhat of late, and I have made up from different tables some
statistics about literary ladies; from one source I find that the
average age to which they live is over sixty-one, and from another
sixty-eight; so that I do not think learning can injure their health.
Harm is often done in this way: where a pupil goes to several different
teachers, one of these, ignorant of the amount required by ot