her
teachers, may give too much work, and this can only be kept balanced by
care from the head teacher, who overlooks the whole."

In regard to whether girls from fourteen to eighteen are able to do as
much work as boys of corresponding age, the experience is as yet too
limited to give any ground for positive opinion. The presumption, based
upon the difference in physical strength, is against it. Still, girls,
on the average, at the best girls' schools, are now doing more work than
the average of boys in the best boys' schools. But these girls have
better care than the boys have, and none of them do the work of the
leading boys, who are looking forward to university honors.

All agree that girls have not less mental aptitude, but no one, I am
sure, would like to assert that it is safe to subject girls to as much
intellectual pressure as may be safely applied to boys. One teacher of
both boys and girls confirmed my own observation, that there is often
some clog in the development of boys which, though less positive in its
action and less productive of a crisis, induces a sort of physical
torpor, which is not wholly attributable to rapid growth, as it often
appears when the growth may be the very reverse of rapid; against this a
boy may be pressed without much danger to his health, but not without
liability to give him a distaste for study, thus showing that we are
making a demand for an amount of mental force which he has not ready at
hand to give. There is, however, but one opinion upon this point--that
the least safe thing to do for girls at this nervously critical and
mentally excitable period is, to allow them time to indulge and feed
their fancies, or to grow weary of themselves; that mental work is as
healthful as food, but, like the food, needs careful regulation; and
that the health of women would be vastly improved by increasing the
school work in degree, and by continuing it beyond the present term,
chiefly as a matter of employment to the women in the upper classes.
Among the lower classes, it would be a means of enabling them to secure
more sanitary arrangements in their homes, and, in general, of enabling
them to get better results from their annual expenditures. The usual
practice in Germany, by which Dr. Clarke confirms his theory, is not the
usual practice in England, and there would be great unwillingness on the
part of English people to accept it as a general rule. Experienced
teachers, women physician