To use a simile which will be intelligible to this generation, women have been treated as if they were stones. Left shapeless under the school-room prison system, they are only fit to be broken up for the roads, as they will fit in nowhere. Our well-educated ancestresses, down to the time of Hannah More, were formed into cubes, very solid and steady on either of their bases, and suitable for many buildings, though the finer kinds of stone are in this manner misapplied. Modern science gives the stones more sides, and, while seeming to round them into more adaptable forms, only produces a number of small facets, making a somewhat polished dodecahedron, which rolls about in any position and is of no particular service, except, maybe, to stick upon a gate-post at a girl's school, though it has given a great deal of trouble in the cutting. But the hourly guidance of the loving hands of father and mother, aided by raspings and filings of circumstances, and many blows from chisels more or less severe, produces at last a beautiful statue, well shaped in all its parts, which becomes a perfect and nobly planned Galatea. What is the best training for girls? That is the question. What are they to be, or not to be? We have tried hitherto to bring up our girls so that they may be fitted for the high position here that we all wish they may attain, making their education tend solely to pleasure; forgetting how easily the nature of woman adapts itself to any superior station, and how soon it seems like everyday life, however high the rank or great the wealth to which a girl may be suddenly raised. We teach religion, when it is taught at all, under the head of "divinity," at school, where it is put on a par with the multiplication-table; or as a series of "religious duties," to be performed once a week and rendered as irksome as possible, quite ignoring that everything we do is our duty towards God, or towards our neighbour, which is part of the same duty; whereas we ought to train our girls for "duties" here, and give them joy in preparing for their high position as daughters of God in heaven. We should let our divine life so permeate through every hour of our stay here, that it may be the vivifying light shed upon everything we are concerned with, making the trifles of this life unfold their beauties, comforting sadness and gilding poverty, as the southern sunshine lights up squalid dwellings till they shine like gold and silver, and makes rags glow with light and colour. Our ideas have changed lately, and now we seem to think that all girls who are not born to high position here must of necessity be trained to professional life. But, after all, the demand for certified teachers, heads of ladies' colleges, doctors, and other learned professions, will never comprise the great bulk of the number of willing workers among the unmarried women of England: nor do these things constitute a quarter of the work to be done.