vious cause of ill
health among women in our country. The great heat of summer, and the
slush and ice of winter, interfere with women who wish to take exercise,
but whose arrangements to go out-of-doors involve wonderful changes of
dress and an amount of preparation appalling to the masculine creature.

The time taken for the more serious instruction of girls extends to the
age of nineteen, and rarely over this. During some of these years they
are undergoing such organic development as renders them remarkably
sensitive. At seventeen I presume that healthy girls are as well able
to study, _with proper precautions_, as men; but before this time
overuse, or even a very steady use, of the brain is in many dangerous to
health and to every probability of future womanly usefulness.

In most of our schools the hours are too many, for both girls and boys.
From nine until two is, with us, the common school-time in private
seminaries. The usual recess is twenty minutes or half an hour, and it
is not as a rule filled by enforced exercise. In certain schools--would
it were common!--ten minutes' recess is given after every hour; and in
the Blind Asylum of Philadelphia this time is taken up by light
gymnastics, which are obligatory. To these hours we must add the time
spent in study out of school. This, for some reason, nearly always
exceeds the time stated by teachers to be necessary; and most girls of
our common schools and normal schools between the ages of thirteen and
seventeen thus expend two or three hours. Does any physician believe
that it is good for a growing girl to be so occupied seven or eight
hours a day? or that it is right for her to use her brains as long a
time as the mechanic employs his muscles? But this is only a part of
the evil. The multiplicity of studies, the number of teachers,--each
eager to get the most he can out of his pupil, the severer drill of our
day, and the greater intensity of application demanded, produce effects
on the growing brain which, in a vast number of cases, can be only
disastrous.

My remarks apply of course chiefly to public school life. I am glad to
say that of late in all of our best school States more thought is now
being given to this subject, but we have much to do before an evil which
is partly a school difficulty and partly a home difficulty shall have
been fully provided against.

Careful reading of our Pennsylvania reports and of those of
Massachusetts convinces me that wh