on any terms, is an institution but little more than a half-century old in the city of Boston.  It is well established by the early deeds and documents that a large proportion of Puritan women could not write their own names; and in Boston especially, for a hundred and fifty years, the public schools included boys only.  In the year 1789, however, the notable discovery was made, that the average attendance of pupils from April to October was only one half of that reported for the remainder of the year.  This was an obvious waste of money and accommodations, and it was therefore proposed that female pupils should be annually introduced during this intermediate period.  Accordingly, school-girls, like other flowers, blossomed in summer only; and this state of things lasted, with but slight modification, for some forty years, according to the School-Superintendent’s Third Report.  It was not till 1828 that all distinctions were abolished in the Boston Common Schools; in the High Schools lingering far later, sole vestige of the “good old times,” before a mistaken economy overthrew the wholesome doctrine of M. Sylvain Marechal, and let loose the alphabet among women.

It is true that Eve ruined us all, according to theology, without knowing her letters.  Still, there is something to be said in defence of that venerable ancestress.  The Veronese lady, Isotta Nogarola, five hundred and thirty-six of whose learned letters were preserved by De Thou, composed a dialogue on the question, Whether Adam or Eve had committed the greater sin?  But Ludovico Domenichi, in his “Dialogue on the Nobleness of Women,” maintains that Eve did not sin at all, because she was not even created when Adam was told not to eat the apple.  It is “in Adam all died,” he shrewdly says; nobody died in Eve;—­which looks plausible.  Be that as it may, Eve’s daughters are in danger of swallowing a whole harvest of forbidden fruit, in these revolutionary days, unless something be done to cut off the supply.

It has been seriously asserted that during the last half-century more books have been written by women and about women than during all the previous uncounted ages.  It may be true; although, when we think of the innumerable volumes of Memoires by Frenchwomen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,—­each one justifying the existence of her own ten volumes by the remark, that all her contemporaries were writing as many,—­we have our doubts.  As to the increased multitude of general treatises on the female sex, however,—­its education, life, health, diseases, charms, dress, deeds, sphere, rights, wrongs, work, wages, encroachments, and idiosyncrasies generally,—­there can be no doubt whatever; and the poorest of these books recognizes a condition of public sentiment which no other age ever dreamed of.  Still, literary history preserves the names of some reformers before the Reformation, in this matter.  There was Signora Moderata Fonte, the Venetian, who left a book to be published after her