112

SEX IN EDUCATION.

to speak plainly, physically unfit for her du­ties as woman, and is, perhaps, of all civilized females, the least qualified to undertake those weightier tasks which tax so heavily the ner­vous system of man. She is not fairly up to what Nature asks from her as wife and mother. How will she sustain herself under the pressure of those yet more exacting duties which now-a-days she is eager to share with the man ? *

In our schools it is the ambitious and con scientious girls, those who have in them the stuff of which the noblest women are made, that suffer, not the romping or lazy sort; and thus our modern ways of education provide for the non-survival of the fittest. A speaker told an audience of women at Wes­leyan Hall not long ago, that he once attended the examination of a Western college, where a girl beat the boys in unravelling the intra- cacies of Juvenal. He did not report the consumption of blood and wear of brain tissue that in her college way of study correlated

* Wear and Tear. By S. Weir Mitchell, M.D.