CO-EDUCATION.

137

brain activity. The result is a most brilliant show of cerebral pyrotechnics, and degenera­tions that we have described.

That undue and disproportionate brain activity exerts a sterilizing influence upon both sexes is alike a doctrine of physiology, and an induction from experience. And both physiology and experience also teach that this influence is more potent upon the female than upon the male. The explanation of the latter fact of the greater aptitude of the female organization to become thus modified by excessive brain activity is probably to be found in the larger size, more complicated relations, and more important functions, of the female reproductive appara­tus. This delicate and complex mechanism is liable to be aborted or deranged by the withdrawal of force that is needed for its construction and maintenance. It is, per­haps, idle to speculate upon the prospective evil that would accrue to the human race, should such an organic modification, intro­duced by abnormal education, be pushed to