Man and Woman, Ch.  VII).  At the International Congress of School Hygiene in 1907 (see, e.g., British Medical Journal, Aug. 24, 1907) Dr. L.H.  Gulick, formerly Director of Physical Training in the Public Schools of New York City, stated that after many experiments it had been found in the New York elementary and high schools that folk-dancing constituted the very best exercise for girls.  “The dances selected involved many contractions of the large muscular masses of the body and had therefore a great effect on respiration, circulation and nutrition.  Such movements, moreover, when done as dances, could be carried on three or four times as long without producing fatigue as formal gymnastics.  Many folk-dances were imitative, sowing and reaping dance, dances expressing trade movements (the shoemaker’s dance), others illustrating attack and defense, or the pursuit of game.  Such neuro-muscular movements were racially old and fitted in with man’s expressive life, and if it were accepted that the folk-dances really expressed an epitome of man’s neuro-muscular history, as distinguished from mere permutation of movements, the folk-dance combinations should be preferred on these biological grounds to the unselected, or even the physiologically selected.  From the aesthetic point of view the sense of beauty as shown in dancing was far commoner than the power to sing, paint or model.”

It must always be remembered that in realizing the especial demands of woman’s nature, we do not commit ourselves to the belief that higher education is unfitted for a woman.  That question may now be regarded as settled.  There is therefore no longer any need for the feverish anxiety of the early leaders of feminine education to prove that girls can be educated exactly as if they were boys, and yield at least as good educational results.  At the present time, indeed, that anxiety is not only unnecessary but mischievous.  It is now more necessary to show that women have special needs just as men have special needs, and that it is as bad for women, and therefore, for the world, to force them to accept the special laws and limitations of men as it would be bad for men, and therefore, for the world, to force men to accept the special laws and limitations of women.  Each sex must seek to reach the goal by following the laws of its own nature, even although it remains desirable that, both in the school and in the world, they should work so far as possible side by side.  The great fact to be remembered always is that, not only are women, in physical size and physical texture, slighter and finer than men, but that to an extent altogether unknown among men, their centre of gravity is apt to be deflected by the series of rhythmic sexual curves on which they are always living.  They are thus more delicately poised and any kind of stress or strain—­cerebral, nervous, or muscular—­is more likely to produce serious disturbance and requires an accurate adjustment to their special needs.