The testimony of Dr. Anstie of London, as to the gravity of the evils incurred by the sort of erroneous education we are considering, is decided and valuable. He says, "For, be it remembered, the epoch of sexual development is one in which an enormous addition is being made to the expenditure of vital energy; besides the continuous processes of growth of the tissues and organs generally, the sexual apparatus, with its nervous supply, is making _by its development heavy demands_ upon the nutritive powers of the organism; and it is scarcely possible but that portions of the nervous centres, not directly connected with it, should proportionally suffer in their nutrition, probably through defective blood supply. When we add to this the abnormal strain that is being put on the brain, in many cases, by a forcing plan of mental education, we shall perceive a source not merely of exhaustive expenditure of nervous power, but of secondary irritation of centres like the medulla oblongata that are probably already somewhat lowered in power of vital resistance, and proportionably _irritable_."[18] A little farther on, Dr. Anstie adds, "But I confess, that, with me, the result of close attention given to the pathology of neuralgia has been the ever-growing conviction, that, next to the influence of neurotic inheritance, there is no such frequently powerful factor in the construction of the neuralgic habit as mental warp of a certain kind, the product of an unwise education." In another place, speaking of the liability of the brain to suffer from an unwise education, and referring to the sexual development that we are discussing in these pages, he makes the following statement, which no intelligent physician will deny, and which it would be well for all teachers who care for the best education of the girls intrusted to their charge to ponder seriously. "I would also go farther, and express the opinion, that peripheral influences of an extremely powerful and _continuous_ kind, where they concur with one of those critical periods of life at which the central nervous system is relatively weak and unstable, can occasionally set going a non-inflammatory centric atrophy, which may localize itself in those nerves upon whose centres the morbific 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.