wrong, the evil of poor nourishment and bad assimilation infects the
whole economy. Brain and thought are enfeebled, because the stomach
and liver are in error. If the nervous system is abnormally developed,
every organ feels the _twist_ in the nerves. The balance and
co-ordination of movement and function are destroyed, and the ill
percolates into an unhappy posterity. If the reproductive system is
aborted, there may be no future generations to pay the penalty of the
abortion, but what is left of the organism suffers sadly. When this
sort of arrest of development occurs in a man, it takes the element of
masculineness out of him, and replaces it with adipose effeminacy.
When it occurs in a woman, it not only substitutes in her case a wiry
and perhaps thin bearded masculineness for distinctive feminine traits
and power, making her an epicene, but it entails a variety of
prolonged weaknesses, that dwarf her rightful power in almost every
direction. The persistent neglect and ignoring by women, and
especially by girls, ignorantly more than wilfully, of that part of
their organization which they hold in trust for the future of the
race, has been fearfully punished here in America, where, of all the
world, they are least trammelled and should be the best, by all sorts
of female troubles. "Nature," says Lord Bacon, "is often hidden,
sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished." In the education of our
girls, the attempt to hide or overcome nature by training them as boys
has almost extinguished them as girls. Let the fact be accepted, that
there is nothing to be ashamed of in a woman's organization, and let
her whole education and life be guided by the divine requirements of
her system.

The blood, which is our life, is a complex fluid. It contains the
materials out of which the tissues are made, and also the _débris_
which results from the destruction of the same tissues,--the worn-out