There should always be some personal instruction at these seasons during earlier adolescent years. I have glanced over nearly a score of books and pamphlets that are especially written for girls; while all are well meant and far better than the ordinary modes by which girls acquire knowledge of their own nature if left to themselves, they are, like books for boys, far too prolix, and most are too scientific and plain and direct. Moreover, no two girls need just the same instruction, and to leave it to reading is too indirect and causes the mind to dwell on it for too long periods. Best of all is individual instruction at the time, concise, practical, and never, especially in the early years, without a certain mystic and religious tone which should pervade all and make everything sacred. This should not be given by male physicians--and indeed most female doctors would make it too professional, and the maiden teacher must forever lack reverence for it--but it should come from one whose soul and body are full of wifehood and motherhood and who is old enough to know and is not without the necessary technical knowledge. Another principle should be to broaden by retarding; to keep the purely mental back and by every method to bring the intuitions to the front; appeals to tact and taste should be incessant; a purely intellectual man is no doubt biologically a deformity, but a purely intellectual woman is far more so. Bookishness is probably a bad sign in a girl; it suggests artificiality, pedantry, the lugging of dead knowledge. Mere learning is not the ideal, and prodigies of scholarship are always morbid. The rule should be to keep nothing that is not to become practical; to open no brain tracts which are not to be highways for the daily traffic of thought and conduct; not to overburden the soul with the impedimenta of libraries and records of what is afar off in time or zest, and always to follow truly the guidance of normal and spontaneous interests wisely interpreted.