the healthiest woman thus task her brain until she is at least nineteen.  If she is to marry, and this puts it off until twenty-three, I consider that a gain not counted by the advocates of the higher education.  I leave to others to survey the broad question of whether or not it will be well for the community that the mass of women should have a collegiate training.  It is a wide and wrathful question, and has of late been very well discussed in Romanes’s paper, and by Mrs. Lynn Linton.  I think the conclusions of the former, on the whole, are just; but now, whatever be my views as to the larger interests of the commonwealth and the future mothers of our race, I must not forget that I am giving, or trying to give, what I may call individualized advice, from the physician’s view, as to what is wisest.

Let us suppose that circumstances make it seem proper to consider an ambitious young woman’s wish, and to let her go to a college for women.  We presume that she has average health.  But let no prudent mother suppose that in these collections of persons of one sex her child will be watched as she has been at home.  At no time will she more need the vigilant insight of a mother, and yet this can only be had through letters and in the holiday seasons.  Nor can the mother always rely upon the girl to put forward what may cause doubt as to her power to go on with her work.  I utterly distrust the statistics of these schools and their graduates as to health, and my want of reliance arises out of the fact that this whole question is in a condition which makes the teachers, scholars, and graduates of such colleges antagonistic to masculine disbelievers in a way and to a degree fatal to truth.  I trust far more what I hear from the women who have broken down under the effort to do more than they were fit to do, for always, say what you may, it is the man’s standard of endurance which is set before them, and up to which they try to live with all the energy which a woman’s higher sense of duty imposes upon the ambitious ones of her sex.  I have often asked myself what should be done to make sure that these schools shall produce the minimum amount of evil; what can be done to avoid the penalties inflicted by over-study and class competitions, and by the emotional stimulus which women carry into all forms of work.  Even if the doctor says this girl is sound and strong, her early months of college labor should be carefully watched.  Above all, her eyes should be seen to, because in my experience some unsuspected disorder of vision has been fruitful of headaches and overstrain of brain, nor is it enough to know that at the beginning her eyes are good.  Extreme use often evolves practical evils from visual difficulties at first so slight as to need or seem to need no correction.

The period of examinations is, too, of all others, the time of danger, and I know of many sad breakdowns due to the exaction and emotional anxieties of these days of competition and excitement.