e these are not
sufficiently numerous for the wants of indefinitely multiplied schools.

But, further, if girls may be educated, and better educated, apart from
boys, it is scarcely possible to give women an intellectual training
apart from men, certainly in the present generation. What may be lost to
men by exclusion from the intellectual companionship of women, may
perhaps be beyond the scope of our present subject to inquire. But the
loss sustained by women, who, shut up in female academies, attempt, or
pretend to make the attempt, to obtain a "college education," is
conspicuous beyond possibility of cavil. The same peculiarities that
render women, as a rule, less original, are justly said to make them
more receptive, more malleable, more exquisitely adjustable to the least
variation of external circumstance, or difference in the intellectual
calibre of their associates or masters. Their own intellects are
quickened to activity or repressed into torpor, by influences that would
have little effect upon the less impressionable, more self-poised minds
of men. These facts, upon which great emphasis has often been laid,
should only lead to one inference, namely, that the education and
intellectual capacity of women is likely to remain at the point, or
advance to the degree at which men may consider it desirable for it to
exist; if, therefore, certain conditions are seen to favor this
advancement to an extraordinary degree, and others to retard it in a
manner as extraordinary; if, in addition to results already achieved by
the increased education of women, others far greater may be foreseen,
when that education shall have become really equal to that now
accessible to men; it becomes imperative to concede the conditions in
question, unless some equally imperative counter indication can be shown
to exist. Reasons of an entirely different order exist, we think, in the
fact that at this age the sexes naturally seek each other's society, as
much as they avoided it before. It is difficult to see why this tendency
requires to be counteracted, except on some monastic principle that is
an unconscious "survival" from the middle ages. Thwarting this tendency
leads often to immorality in the one sex--to languor, and mental, moral,
and physical debility in the other.

Dr. Clarke places his counter indication almost exclusively in the
supposed necessity for a periodical intermittence in the intellectual
work of women, that could not, t