of physique needful to make intellectual training available in the struggle of life.  Those who, in eagerness to cultivate their pupils’ minds, are reckless of their bodies, do not remember that success in the world depends more on energy than on information; and that a policy which in cramming with information undermines energy, is self-defeating.  The strong will and untiring activity due to abundant animal vigour, go far to compensate even great defects of education; and when joined with that quite adequate education which may be obtained without sacrificing health, they ensure an easy victory over competitors enfeebled by excessive study:  prodigies of learning though they may be.  A comparatively small and ill-made engine, worked at high pressure, will do more than a large and well-finished one worked at low-pressure.  What folly is it, then, while finishing the engine, so to damage the boiler that it will not generate steam!  Once more, the system is a mistake, as involving a false estimate of welfare in life.  Even supposing it were a means to worldly success, instead of a means to worldly failure, yet, in the entailed ill-health, it would inflict a more than equivalent curse.  What boots it to have attained wealth, if the wealth is accompanied by ceaseless ailments?  What is the worth of distinction, if it has brought hypochondria with it?  Surely no one needs telling that a good digestion, a bounding pulse, and high spirits, are elements of happiness which no external advantages can out-balance.  Chronic bodily disorder casts a gloom over the brightest prospects; while the vivacity of strong health gilds even misfortune.  We contend, then, that this over-education is vicious in every way—­vicious, as giving knowledge that will soon be forgotten; vicious, as producing a disgust for knowledge; vicious, as neglecting that organisation of knowledge which is more important than its acquisition; vicious, as weakening or destroying that energy without which a trained intellect is useless; vicious, as entailing that ill-health for which even success would not compensate, and which makes failure doubly bitter.  On women the effects of this forcing system are, if possible, even more injurious than on men.  Being in great measure debarred from those vigorous and enjoyable exercises of body by which boys mitigate the evils of excessive study, girls feel these evils in their full intensity.  Hence, the much smaller proportion of them who grow up well-made and healthy.  In the pale, angular, flat-chested young ladies, so abundant in London drawing-rooms, we see the effect of merciless application, unrelieved by youthful sports; and this physical degeneracy hinders their welfare far more than their many accomplishments aid it.  Mammas anxious to make their daughters attractive, could scarcely choose a course more fatal than this, which sacrifices the body to the mind.  Either they disregard the tastes of the opposite sex, or else their conception of those tastes is erroneous.