Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/235

Rh and partially paralyzed, as well as the mental power weakened. If undue calls are made on one part, the other portions suffer. Now this wondrous and as yet only partially known organ has grown most of its growth, in so far as mere bulk is concerned, by the time adolescence begins. But its higher qualities—its force, its power of producing varied energies—are then only nascent. They develop during this period. It is then that the brain needs plenty of rest in sleep, fresh air, pure blood, good, nourishing, non-stimulating food, and work that develops but does not exhaust. The mental portion of the brain is no doubt the highest, and undue calls on that portion exhaust more than any other part. As I said, only a certain amount of energy or work is possible by any amount of stimulation. The brain has most diversified functions, but it has also a solidarity of action. No part is sick without all the other parts suffering. No function is overtaxed without all the other functions being weakened. Overtaxing of the mental function is specially weakening. In mature life, after the body is fully developed, such an overtaxing can be repaired by rest. The injury is merely temporary. If a man overworks his brain in business or study, and gives himself too little sleep, and gets an attack of indigestion, it means that he has taken up the brain-energy that ought to have gone toward digestion in mental work. But he stops work, goes to the country, and his recuperated brain soon acquires force enough to stimulate the stomach to secrete its juices and do its work. But if in adolescence, before the bones are knit, and the growth completed, and the feminine nature far advanced toward perfection, if the brain that is in the process of doing all these things is year by year called on to exert its yet imperfect forces chiefly in acquiring book-knowledge by long hours of study, and in consequence the growth is stopped, the blood is thinned, the cheeks are pallid, the fat destroyed, the wondrous forces and faculties that I have spoken of are arrested before they attain completion, then, when the period of growth and development ceases, the damage is irreparable. There is no time or place of organic repentance provided by Nature for the sins of the schoolmaster. Life has to be faced with an imperfect organism, its work and duties done with impaired forces, and its chances of accidents met without a stock of reserve power. This is a poor lookout for the individual; but when motherhood comes, and sound minds in sound bodies have to be transmitted to posterity, how is it to be then with the future race? This aspect of the question of female education during the period of adolescence is of absolutely primary importance to the world. Yet it is wholly ignored in many systems of education. What is the use of culture, if it is all to end with the present generation? What a responsibility to transmit to future generations weak bodies and over-sensitive brains, liable to all sorts of nervous disease! Nothing can be more certain than that the qualities, good and bad, acquired in one generation are sent on to the next. The world may be all the