peripheral influence is perpetually pouring in. Even such influences
as the psychical and emotional, be it remembered, must be considered
peripheral."[19] The brain of Miss G----, whose case was related a few
pages back, is a clinical illustration of the accuracy of this
opinion.

Dr. Weir Mitchell, one of our most eminent American physiologists, has
recently borne most emphatic testimony to the evils we have pointed
out: "Worst of all," he says, "to my mind, most destructive in every
way, is the American view of female education. The time taken for the
more serious instruction of girls extends to the age of eighteen, and
rarely over this. During these years, they are undergoing such organic
development as renders them remarkably sensitive." ... "To show more
precisely how the growing girl is injured by the causes just
mentioned" (forced and continued study at the sexual epoch) "would
carry me upon subjects unfit for full discussion in these pages; but
no thoughtful reader can be much at a loss as to my meaning." ...
"To-day the American woman is, to speak plainly, physically unfit for
her duties as woman, and is, perhaps, of all civilized females, the
least qualified to undertake those weightier tasks which tax so
heavily the nervous system of man. She is not fairly up to what Nature
asks from her as wife and mother. How will she sustain herself under
the pressure of those yet more exacting duties which now-a-days she is
eager to share with the man?"[20]

In our schools it is the ambitious and conscientious girls, those who
have in them the stuff of which the noblest women are made, that
suffer, not the romping or lazy sort; and thus our modern ways of
education provide for the "non-survival of the fittest." A speaker
told an audience of women at Wesleyan Hall not long ago, that he once