Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/231

Rh one or two great men, and then relapse into greater obscurity than before, or become degenerate and die out altogether!

Another fact in the body and mind history of human beings is this, that there are certain physiological eras or periods in life, each of which has a certain meaning. The chief of such eras are childhood, puberty, adolescence, maturity, the climacteric, and senility. We have to ascertain, What does Nature mean by these eras? What does it strive to attain to in each period? What are the ideal conditions of each? No one of these periods can be studied from a bodily point of view alone, or from a mental point of view alone. They must be regarded from the point of view of the whole living being, with all its powers and faculties, bodily and mental. Not only so, but in most cases the inherited weaknesses must be taken into account too. Those eras of life can not be fully understood looked at with reference to the individual. Their meaning is only seen when the social life, the ancestral life, and the life of the future race, are all taken into account. And this is what makes some proper attention to those eras so very important from the social as well as the physician's point of view. If they are not understood, and so are mismanaged, not only the individual suffers, but society and the race of the future. Particularly the era of adolescence is important, for it is the summer ripening time in the vital history. If the grain is poorly matured, it is not good for either eating or sowing.

Such is the physician's, or perhaps I should rather say the physiologist's, way of regarding a woman, her development, and her education. It is because we do not think the average parent and the professional educator in the technical sense always take this wide view, but that the professional enthusiasm of the latter takes account of, and tries to cultivate, one set of faculties only, viz., the mental; because we think the public mind is getting to regard as all-important in female education what we think is not so important, and so to take little account of what we regard as of supreme importance to the individual and to the race viz., the constitution and the health that I think that the physiological view of female education should be brought forward and presented to the public mind more frequently than is the case; while the bad results in after-life of disregarding Nature's laws, as these results come under the notice of the physician, should be strongly and clearly brought before the general mass of parents and educators. It is not a matter that concerns the physician and his immediate patient only. It concerns the whole of the people.

I shall now enter more into detail in illustration of the general principles I have mentioned, as applied to that period of the life of a young woman when the chief part of her education is going on. I am not going to speak much of the period of childhood, or up to the age of thirteen or so. Before that time it is no doubt important that education should be conducted on physiological principles, with due regard