sexual development is one in which an enormous addition is being made
to the expenditure of vital energy; besides the continuous processes
of growth of the tissues and organs generally, the sexual apparatus,
with its nervous supply, is making _by its development heavy demands_
upon the nutritive powers of the organism; and it is scarcely possible
but that portions of the nervous centres, not directly connected with
it, should proportionally suffer in their nutrition, probably through
defective blood supply. When we add to this the abnormal strain that
is being put on the brain, in many cases, by a forcing plan of mental
education, we shall perceive a source not merely of exhaustive
expenditure of nervous power, but of secondary irritation of centres
like the medulla oblongata that are probably already somewhat lowered
in power of vital resistance, and proportionably _irritable_."[18] A
little farther on, Dr. Anstie adds, "But I confess, that, with me, the
result of close attention given to the pathology of neuralgia has been
the ever-growing conviction, that, next to the influence of neurotic
inheritance, there is no such frequently powerful factor in the
construction of the neuralgic habit as mental warp of a certain kind,
the product of an unwise education." In another place, speaking of the
liability of the brain to suffer from an unwise education, and
referring to the sexual development that we are discussing in these
pages, he makes the following statement, which no intelligent
physician will deny, and which it would be well for all teachers who
care for the best education of the girls intrusted to their charge to
ponder seriously. "I would also go farther, and express the opinion,
that peripheral influences of an extremely powerful and _continuous_
kind, where they concur with one of those critical periods of life at
which the central nervous system is relatively weak and unstable, can
occasionally set going a non-inflammatory centric atrophy, which may
localize itself in those nerves upon whose centres the morbific