Men care little for erudition in women; but very much for physical beauty, good nature, and sound sense.  How many conquests does the blue-stocking make through her extensive knowledge of history?  What man ever fell in love with a woman because she understood Italian?  Where is the Edwin who was brought to Angelina’s feet by her German?  But rosy cheeks and laughing eyes are great attractions.  A finely rounded figure draws admiring glances.  The liveliness and good humour that overflowing health produces, go a great way towards establishing attachments.  Every one knows cases where bodily perfections, in the absence of all other recommendations, have incited a passion that carried all before it; but scarcely any one can point to a case where intellectual acquirements, apart from moral or physical attributes, have aroused such a feeling.  The truth is that, out of the many elements uniting in various proportions to produce in a man’s breast the complex emotion we call love, the strongest are those produced by physical attractions; the next in order of strength are those produced by moral attractions; the weakest are those produced by intellectual attractions; and even these are dependent less on acquired knowledge than on natural faculty—­quickness, wit, insight.  If any think the assertion a derogatory one, and inveigh against the masculine character for being thus swayed; we reply that they little know what they say when they thus call in question the Divine ordinations.  Even were there no obvious meaning in the arrangement, we might be sure that some important end was subserved.  But the meaning is quite obvious to those who examine.  When we remember that one of Nature’s ends, or rather her supreme end, is the welfare of posterity; further that, in so far as posterity are concerned, a cultivated intelligence based on a bad physique is of little worth, since its descendants will die out in a generation or two; and conversely that a good physique, however poor the accompanying mental endowments, is worth preserving, because, throughout future generations, the mental endowments may be indefinitely developed; we perceive how important is the balance of instincts above described.  But, advantage apart, the instincts being thus balanced, it is folly to persist in a system which undermines a girl’s constitution that it may overload her memory.  Educate as highly as possible—­the higher the better—­providing no bodily injury is entailed (and we may remark, in passing, that a sufficiently high standard might be reached were the parrot-faculty cultivated less, and the human faculty more, and were the discipline extended over that now wasted period between leaving school and being married).  But to educate in such manner, or to such extent, as to produce physical degeneracy, is to defeat the chief end for which the toil and cost and anxiety are submitted to.  By subjecting their daughters to this high-pressure system, parents frequently ruin their prospects in life.  Besides inflicting on them enfeebled health, with all its pains and disabilities and gloom; they not unfrequently doom them to celibacy.