t with the General Assembly of
the State it has passed into a proverb that "The Woman's
Reformatory is the best and most economically managed of the State
institutions." The committees appointed to visit the penal
institutions always report that "The accounts of the reformatory
are kept so accurately that its financial status can always be
understood at a glance."

This institution has two distinct departments, the penal and the
reformatory, occupying two sides of one main building and joined
under one management. Convicts above sixteen years of age are
ranked as women and confined in the penal department; those under
sixteen years are accounted girls (children) and lodged in the
reformatory department.

The average number of girls in the institution from its opening has
been 150; the number of women 45. There are now (July, 1885,) over
200 inmates.

All of the work of the institution is done by its inmates. A school
is maintained in the building for the children; a few trades are
taught the girls; all are taught housework, laundry work, plain
sewing and mending; the greatest pains is taken to form in the
inmates habits of industry and personal tidiness, and to prepare
them to be good servants; and when their period of incarceration
has expired, the ladies interest themselves in finding homes and
employment for the discharged convicts whom they seek to restore to
normal relations to society. The secretary estimates that of those
who have been discharged from the institution during the last
twelve years, fully seventy-five per cent. have been really
restored and are leading honest and industrious lives.

[D.]

GOV. PORTER'S BIENNIAL MESSAGE, 1883: "I recommend that in the
department for women in this hospital it shall be required by law
that at least one of the physicians shall be a woman. There are now
in this State not a few women who bear diplomas from respectable
medical colleges, and who are qualified by professional attainments
and experience to fill places as physicians in public institutions
with credit and usefulness. It would be peculiarly fit that their
services should be sought in cases of insanity among members of
their own sex."

[E.]

About the year 1867, Miss Lucinda B. Jenkins, formerly of Wayne
county, Indiana, left her work among the "Freedmen" in the South,
to accept the position of matron in "The Soldiers' Orphans' Home"
at Knightstown, Indiana. She afterwards became the wife of Dr.