To fill the pages of two centuries, blank, in America, as to female education beyond the merest rudiments of learning, let Abigail, wife of President John Adams, who was descended from the most illustrious colonial families, the Shepards, Nortons, and Quincys, sketch for us the intellectual opportunities for girls of her own rank in her time. Born in 1744, she wrote, in 1817, when past threescore and ten: “The only chance for much intellectual improvement in the female sex was to be found in the families of the educated class, and in occasional intercourse with the learned of the day. Whatever of useful instruction was received in the practical conduct of life came from maternal lips: and what of farther mental development, depended more upon the eagerness with which the casual teachings of daily conversation were treasured up, than upon any labor expended purposely to promote it. Female education in the best families went no farther than writing and arithmetic, and, in some few and rare instances, music and dancing.” Although at this time the number of post-offices in the country probably did not exceed half a hundred, Mrs. Adams notes a great letter-writing propensity in her circle. “These letters deserve notice,” says her biographer, “only as they furnish a general idea of the tastes and pursuits of the day, and show the evident influence upon the writers which study of “The Spectator” and of the poets had exerted.” This appears in the train of thought and structure of language, as in trifles of taste for quotation, and for fictitious signatures. “Calliope” and “Myra,” “Aspasia” and “Aurelia,” have effectually disguised their true names from the eyes of younger generations. Miss Smith’s signature appears to have been “Diana,” a name which she dropped after her marriage, without losing the fancy that prompted its selection. Her letters written during the Revolution show clearly enough the tendency of her own thoughts and feelings in the substitute she then adopted of “Portia.” The young ladies of Massachusetts, in the last century, were certainly readers even though only self-taught, and their taste was not for the feeble and nerveless sentiment or the frantic passion of our day, but was derived from the deepest wells of English literature. The superb flowering of native mental gifts in many women of the last part of the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries, under so slight stimulus of educational advantage, would almost force upon us the theory of Descartes, that “in order to improve the mind we ought less to learn than to contemplate”; and lead us to accept the dictum of Huxley, that “all the time we are using our plain common sense we are at once scientists and artists.”