On the question of health Miss Beale was most emphatic. She did not believe that study alone injured health, and in her belief she is more in sympathy with the thought of to-day than with that of twenty or thirty years ago. Examinations and study in the early days of higher education for women seemed to work a good deal of havoc with health. But when we look back in the light of modern thought much of the harm seems to have been wrought by unscientific arrangement of hours of work--it was considered heroic to “burn the midnight oil”; the eating of insufficient or unsuitable food; the undertaking of strenuous work by delicate girls unfit for hard work of any kind; and the lack of wholesome recreation. When she was asked by Mr. Acland about the effect of eagerness in study on the health of girls about sixteen, she replied:-- “I think it improved their health very much, and I am sure great harm is often done by a hasty recommendation to throw aside all study when a temperate and wisely regulated mental diet is really required. They will not do nothing--you cannot say to the human mind that it shall absolutely rest; but if they have not wholesome and proper and unexciting occupations they will spend their time on sensational novels and things much more injurious to their health. When I have heard complaints about health being injured by study, they have proceeded from those who have done least work at college. Indeed I do not know of any case of a pupil who has really worked and whose health has been injured: we have had complaints in a few cases where the girls have been decidedly not industrious.” The following emphatic statement expresses the opinion of most educationalists on the deplorable effect that “just going to live at home” has on the health of many girls. There are few things that teachers of senior girls dread more than an aimless life in a home where there are no responsibilities and no definite duties. There is no real reason, of course, why this should be so, as a girl of leisure at home has often opportunities of doing work that no one else can do; but many lack the energy and enterprise for seeking out such work, and are, in consequence, idle and miserable:-- “For one girl in the higher middle classes who suffers from overwork, there are, I believe, hundreds whose health suffers from the feverish love of excitement, from the irritability produced by idleness and frivolity and discontent. I am persuaded, and my opinion has been confirmed by experienced doctors, that the want of wholesome occupation lies at the root of much of the languid debility of which we hear so much after girls have left school.”