It appeared that one young woman, daughter of a master, had pursued a three years’ course of study in the Latin School, sitting and reciting with the other pupils, and winning the highest esteem for modesty and ability. From this course she had graduated with so solid a foundation of scholarship that at the age of twenty-two she had received the title of “Doctor of Philosophy” from “Boston University,” and was the first woman in this country to take such a degree. The opposition to the granting of the petition was most strongly presented by six distinguished presidents of male colleges and by two Harvard graduates. President Eliot of Harvard College opposed the admittance of girls to the Latin School, saying, “I resist the proposition for the sake of the boys, the girls, and the schools, and in the general interest of American education.” Hon. Charles F. Adams wrote, “I suppose the experiment of uniting the two sexes in education, at a mature age, is likely to be fully tried. It will go on until some shocking scandals develop the danger.” President Porter of Yale College thought “boys and girls from the ages of fourteen to eighteen should not recite in the same class-room, nor meet in the same study hall. The natural feelings of rightly trained boys and girls are offended by social intercourse of the sort, so frequent, so free, and so unceremonious. The classical culture of boys and girls, even when it takes both through the same curriculum, should not be imparted by precisely the same methods nor with the same controlling aims. I hold that these should differ in some important respects for each.” President Bartlett of Dartmouth College said: “Girls cannot endure the hard, unintermitting, and long-continued strain to which boys are subjected.... Were girls admitted to the Latin School I should have no fear that they would not for the time hold their own with the boys, spurred on as they would be by their own native excitableness, their ambition, and the stimulus of public comparison. I should rather fear their success with its penalty of shortened lives or permanently deranged constitutions. You must, in the long run, overtask and injure the girls, or you must sacrifice the present and legitimate standard of a school for boys.... It should be added that almost every department of study, including classical studies, inevitably touches upon certain regions of discussion and allusion which must be encountered and which cannot be treated as they ought to be in the presence of both boys and girls.” An eminent classicist, Prof. William Everett, said: “To introduce girls into the Latin School would be a legal and moral wrong to the graduates”; and declared that “Greek literature is not fit for girls”; and, substantially, that what was a mental tonic for boys would be dangerous for girls.