With all her weakness, her unstable emotionality, her tendency to morally warp when long nervously ill, she is then far easier to deal with, far more amenable to reason, far more sure to be comfortable as a patient, than the man who is relatively in a like position. The reasons for this are too obvious to delay me here, and physicians accustomed to deal with both sexes as sick people will be apt to justify my position. It would be easy, and in some sense valuable, could a man of large experience and intelligent sympathies write a book for women, in which he would treat plainly of the normal circle of their physiological lives; but this would be a method of dealing with the whole matter which would be open to criticism, and for me, at least, a task difficult to the verge of the impossible. I propose a more superficial plan as on the whole the most useful. The man who desires to write in a popular way of nervous women and of her who is to be taught how not to become that sorrowful thing, a nervous woman, must acknowledge, like the Anglo-Saxon novelist, certain reputable limitations. The best readers are, however, in a measure co-operative authors, and may be left to interpolate the unsaid. A true book is the author, the book and the reader. And this is so not only as to what is left for the reader to fill in, but also has larger applications. All this may be commonplace enough, but naturally comes back to one who is making personal appeals without the aid of personal presence. Because what I shall write is meant for popular use rather than for my own profession, I have made my statements as simple as possible. Scarcely a fact I state, or a piece of advice I give, might not be explained or justified by physiological reasoning which would carry me far beyond the depth of those for whom I wrote. All this I have sedulously avoided. What I shall have to say in these pages will trench but little on the mooted ground of the differences between men and women. I take women as they are to my experience. For me the grave significance of sexual difference controls the whole question, and, if I say little of it in words, I cannot exclude it from my thought of them and their difficulties. The woman's desire to be on a level of competition with man and to assume his duties is, I am sure, making mischief, for it is my belief that no length of generations of change in her education and modes of activity will ever really alter her characteristics. She is physiologically other than the man. I am concerned with her now as she is, only desiring to help her in my small way to be in wiser and more healthful fashion what I believe her Maker meant her to be, and to teach her how not to be that with which her physiological construction and the strong ordeals of her sexual life threaten her as no contingencies of man's career threaten in like measure or like number the feeblest of the masculine sex. THE PHYSICIAN.