gard to them. Whenever a writer, by previous and just reputation, offers conclusive proof of such apprenticeship, familiarity, and ability to judge, his conclusions must be examined with care, and disputed, if at all, with respect.

Yet such examination is as essential to the interests of truth as is the just ascendency that may be acquired by repeated success in the difficult task of investigation. Those who reject it as superfluous or impertinent, or who decry opposition as shallow obstinacy, are always those least competent to measure the weight of arguments on either side, and whose approval of authority must be as valueless as the dissent from authority certainly may be.

The singular avidity with which the press and the public have seized upon the theme discussed in Dr. Clarke's book on Sex in Education, is a proof that this appeals to many interests besides those of scientific truth. The public cares little about science, except in so far as its conclusions can be made to intervene in behalf of some moral, religious, or social controversy.

In the present case, a delicate physiological problem has become as popular as theories on epigenesis, spontaneous generation, or Darwinian evolution, and for an analogous reason. As the latter are expected to decide in the doctrines of natural or revealed religion, so the former is supposed to have a casting vote in regard to the agitating claims for the extension of new powers to women. On the one hand, the inspiration of scripture, on the other, the admission of women to Harvard, is at stake, and it is these that lend the peculiar animus and animation to the discussion. In both polemics, arguments are not accepted because they are demonstrated, but enlisted because they are useful; ranged with others recruited from the most distant quarters, with nothing in

common but the regiment into which they are all thrust, to be hurled against a common enemy.

A remarkable change has taken place in the tone of habitual remark on the capacities and incapacities of women. Formerly, they were denied the privileges of an intellectual education, on the ground that their natures were too exclusively animal to require it. To-day, the same education is still withheld, but on the new plea that their animal nature is too imperfectly developed to enable them to avail themselves of it. Formerly, psychology was widely separated from physiology, and the study of the mind began and ended with demonstrations of the immense gulf by which it was separated from the body. To-day, psychology has become a section of physiology, and mental philosophers busy themselves with searching out in all its details, the close dependence of the mind upon the body. Insanity has become an inflammation of the cortical substance of the brain: idiocy results from a fœtal meningitis: genius is a form of scrofula closely allied to mania: in sleep, the brain loses blood, in intellectual excitement, attracts blood; in the illumination of the death-bed, or the delirium of drunkenness, the circulation through the brain is quickened; in torpidity, melancholy, stupidity, the circulation slackens and stag

nates.

With this tendency, whose legitimacy we are certainly far from disputing, it is inevitable that the old doctrine of the mental inferiority of women should be defended, if at all, on a new basis; a basis organic, structural, physiological, hence incontrovertible; on an analysis, not of her reasoning faculties, her impulses, her emotions, her logic, her ignorance, but of her digestion, her nerves, her muscles, her circulation. It is inevitable, therefore, that

the two great functions of parturition and ovulation, of which the latter is peculiar in form,* and the former altogether peculiar to the female sex, should assume peculiar importance in all discussions about women—inevitable, that to these should be attributed the inferiority of mental calibre or of mental achievement that few care more openly to maintain.†

A mysterious interest has indeed always attached to these functions. From the Mosaic law to Raciborski, from the denunciations of the school-men to the rhapsodies of Michelet, they have been invoked in every theory on the nature of women; that is, in every theory on the organization of society. In virtue of them, the woman has been considered, now unclean, now angelic, now touchingly (but irredeemably) helpless. In this connection, the association of ideas has been almost always too powerful and too varied to admit of a dispassionate examination of facts. Yet to-day, as already said, the old conclusions may be urged with even greater force than before, because apparently based exclusively upon such cool and impartial investigation.

The issue is certainly serious. From all sides surges testimony to the importance of physical conditions as the basis of mental and social life. According to many, it is

* The development of reproductive cells in special glandular apparatus at the period of puberty, is evidently not peculiar to one sex, but is a physiological fact necessarily common to both. The peculiarity in the female consists in the greater degree of periodicity in the complete development of such cells, in the periodical congestions of a secondary organ, the uterus, and in the loss of blood effected by these.

Thus Herbert Spencer remarks that the mental development of women must be arrested earlier than that of men, in order to leave a margin for reproduction.

by the absence of a few grains of iodine from the water of drinking fountains, that the people of the Alps are turned into cretins. According to others, it is by the presence of a few grains of ergot in the bread, that the people of Tuscany lose their limbs in gangrene. Endemics of abortion depend on the impalpable vapors that arise from the quicksilver mines of Spain. So delicately poised are the forces of life, that an apparent trifle suffices to entirely turn the scale. It is therefore not a priori improbable, that the marked peculiarities of physical organization that distinguish the female sex, should determine a radically different mode of mental existence, and exact radically different conditions of mental activity.

The whole question, however, is not one of probability or of possibility, but of fact. Hence, the last persons capable of judging in the matter, are those who have been vividly impressed with those circumstances that furnish, or may be made to furnish, food for the imagination. Of these, Michelet is perhaps the type, but certainly many of the reviewers who have been occupied with Dr. Clarke's book, must be ranked in the same class. Would it be disrespectful to Dr. Clarke's far better informed judgment and technical knowledge to suggest, that he himself does not seem to be perfectly free from the influence of the glamour that invests the study of physiological peculiarities in women, wherever these can be made to tell upon any social or moral relations? Dr. Clarke does not. indeed affirm, with Michelet, that women are essentially diseased. "La femme est une

malade." Where Michelet leaves to the healthiest women but a single week of every month for normal existence, Dr. Clarke believes that one week out of the month alone requires any special precautions, and that,

with decent care at this time, "an immense amount of work" can be accomplished in the remainder. He is careful to say, and even to repeat, that the intellectual labor to which such disastrous results are attributed, is not in itself incompatible with the nature of the woman, nor, even when improperly pursued, can it be considered as the sole cause of the delicate health of American girls. Dr. Clarke indeed guards his every assertion with a care and precision that is worthy of imitation by those who draw such large deductions from his book. When, however, all illegitimate inferences have been set aside, and we come to the propositions really and categorically maintained, we find the following:

1st. During the catamenial period, i.e., during one week out of every month, a woman should abandon intellectual or physical labor, either because she is already incapacitated for it, or because she will be so ultimately, if she does not take the precautionary rest.

2d. A large number of American girls become affected with amenorrhea * or menorrhagia † solely on account of excessive mental exertion at such periodical epochs of incapacity.

3d. It is possible to educate girls properly, only by regularly intermitting their studies at such times, and by conceding to nature her moderate but inexorable demand for rest during one week out of four."

4th. Consequently, it is chimerical to attempt to educate girls with boys, whose organization requires no such periodical intermittence.

5th. If sufficient precaution be observed during the first years of adolescence, and the establishment of men

* Absence of menstruation.

Excessive menstrual hemorrhage.