In all ways, the natural languors and disabilities of the girl's adolescent phase are vigorously combated. The unfortunate young developing creature is exhorted, spurred--compelled by rigid rule, indeed (whatsoever her physiological disabilities), to take her part in strenuous exertions; hard drill, cricket, hockey, football; with the aim of developing masculine muscles where feminine muscles should be. At the same time, her brain is forced, crammed and exploited by perpetual mental tasks; by competitive examinations, or by some or another strain of specialism, intellectual or industrial. The result is that she is forcibly precluded from evolving to those higher, subtler modes of body and of mind, which are the essence, the charm and the inspiration of the sex; and the model of the Race to be. Our school-girls and work-girls, in whose already impoverished, or degenerate, bodies this battle for their resources between Nature and Culture (or Industrialism) is waged--the one to make them normal, the other to make them abnormal--are all more or less in states of disease; are chlorotic, anæmic, neurotic, dyspeptic, hysterical; or suffer from ailments special to their sex. While some are sturdy and florid and buxom (prematurely middle-aged), more are neurasthenic and attenuated, ill-nourished, spectacled, breastless, hipless, pale or pimply; are restless, emotionless, joyless, cynical, discontented. In but few are found the thrill and joy, the pulse and spring and natural enthusiasms of healthy, happy young creatures in the dawn and grace of maidenhood. Such as are charming and pretty possess these natural woman-characteristics only too often in fragile and weed-like form. The constitutional degeneracy of some shows in precocious sex-development--all precocity being degeneracy, development too rapid and exhaustive, and entailing therefore flimsy and unstable tissue-cells, faulty functioning and premature decline. A proportion, one is thankful to say, are normal and healthful and charming, endowed with the attributes and graces, personal and mental, for which Nature is shaping in the sex. Others are, biologically speaking, mere lamentable "spoiled copies"; amazons of the hockey, football, tennis or hunting-fields, only just distinguishable in general characteristics from the male, and lacking more or less wholly in womanly psychology and aptitude, and in all the fairer and nobler attributes of their sex. Still others, although handsome and finely female of physique, are "splendidly null" in respect of the emotions, and of the other subtler and psychical developments of natural womanhood.