many who will say that late hours, styles of dress, prolonged dancing, etc., are to blame; while really, with rare exceptions, the newer fashions have been more healthy than those they superseded, people are better clad and better warmed than ever, and, save in rare cases, late hours and overexertion in the dance are utterly incapable of alone explaining the mischief.  I am far more inclined to believe that climatic peculiarities have formed the groundwork of the evil, and enabled every injurious agency to produce an effect which would not in some other countries be so severe.  I am quite persuaded, indeed, that the development of a nervous temperament is one of the many race-changes which are also giving us facial, vocal, and other peculiarities derived from none of our ancestral stocks.  If, as I believe, this change of temperament in a people coming largely from the phlegmatic races is to be seen most remarkably in the more nervous sex, it will not surprise us that it should be fostered by many causes which are fully within our own control.  Given such a tendency, disease will find in it a ready prey, want of exercise will fatally increase it, and all the follies of fashion will aid in the work of ruin.

While a part of the mischief lies with climatic conditions which are utterly mysterious, the obstacles to physical exercise, arising from extremes of temperature, constitute at least one obvious 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