during the epoch of development, that is, from the age of fourteen to
eighteen or twenty, not only produces great evil at the time of the
neglect, but leaves a large legacy of evil to the future. The system
is then peculiarly susceptible; and disturbances of the delicate
mechanism we are considering, induced during the catamenial weeks of
that critical age by constrained positions, muscular effort, brain
work, and all forms of mental and physical excitement, germinate a
host of ills. Sometimes these causes, which pervade more or less the
methods of instruction in our public and private schools, which our
social customs ignore, and to which operatives of all sorts pay little
heed, produce an excessive performance of the catamenial function; and
this is equivalent to a periodical hemorrhage. Sometimes they produce
an insufficient performance of it; and this, by closing an avenue of
elimination, poisons the blood, and depraves the organization. The
host of ills thus induced are known to physicians and to the sufferers
as amenorrhoea, menorrhagia, dysmenorrhoea, hysteria, anemia, chorea,
and the like. Some of these fasten themselves on their victim for a
lifetime, and some are shaken off. Now and then they lead to an
abortion of the function, and consequent sterility. Fortunate is the
girls' school or college that does not furnish abundant examples of
these sad cases. The more completely any such school or college
succeeds, while adopting every detail and method of a boy's school,
in ignoring and neglecting the physiological conditions of sexual
development, the larger will be the number of these pathological cases
among its graduates. Clinical illustrations of these statements will
be given in another place.

The mysterious process which physiologists call metamorphosis of
tissue, or intestitial change, deserves attention in connection with
our subject. It interests both sexes alike. Unless it goes on