Again, therefore, it may be said, that wherever such intermittence is not superfluous, it would be inadequate for the purpose for which it is designed. But this conclusion may seem to be much more severe, and, to those interested in the education of girls, much more disagreeable than that formulated by Dr. Clarke. We firmly believe, however, that truth never can be disagreeable when it is really understood in all its bearings and all its consequences, and conversely, that any proposition framed with a view to supposed desirableness rather than veracity, is almost certain to lead in the end to consequences quite undesirable. We will not, therefore, try to decide whether it may be more agreeable to believe that the health of adolescent girls requires general and permanent supervision, or that all responsibility may be discharged by confining them to a sofa and a novel for one week out of every four; to believe that a certain number of women, as of men, are always unfit for intellectual exertion, or that all women are inevitably rendered so unfit during one quarter of their lives at times unknown to outsiders, and which, therefore, may be at any time; to believe that the increased delicacy of women in civilized societies depends on a cultivated predominance of their ganglionic nervous system and emotional functions, or on the excessive stimulus of the cerebro-spinal system and on intellectual cultivation. More useful than such discussion is the consideration of the methods that might be proposed, instead of that suggested by Dr. Clarke in the third proposition we have formulated from his book. Dr. Clarke's method is to provide regular intermittences in the education of girls, "conceding to Nature her moderate but inexorable demand for rest, during one week out of four." The method that we believe to be suggested by the foregoing considerations would be more complex, but, we think, at once more effectual and less inconvenient. It may be stated in the following formula: "Secure the predominance of the cerebro-spinal system over the activity of the ganglionic." Since the activity of the cerebro-spinal system may be roughly[46] divided into a twofold direction, intellectual and muscular, this predominance is to be secured by assiduous cultivation of the intellect as compared with the emotions, and of the muscles of the limbs as compared with the muscular fibre of the blood-vessels. In other words, the evil effects of school competition, and of the emotional excitement natural to adolescence, are to be combated by a larger, wider, slower, and more complete intellectual education than at present falls to the lot of either boys or girls. And the dangers incident to the development of new activity in the ganglionic nervous system by the functions of the ovaries, the dangers of irregular circulation, vaso-motor spasm and paralysis, are to be averted by systematic physical exercise, that shall stimulate the spinal