The Americanized European

WHEN the hens as by a common impulse all make a sudden rush for the spot where their lord and master is scratching, it is pretty certain that he has unearthed some seed or kernel of more than common pretensions. So the quick and somewhat tumultuous movement of the unfeathered sisterhood upon the first essay of Dr. Clarke’s gave reasonable cause for thinking that he had uncovered some notable grain of truth by the scratches of his pen. The slender volume, Sex in Education,¹ is, in fact, a seed which, in spite of having, been so vivaciously pecked at, has germinated, and brought forth a hundred fold, and is now the parent of a little library on the subject it discussed. As for the work itself, about a dozen editions of it within the few months since its publication show that it was called for and continues to be wanted.

Dr. Clarke has followed up his first essay with a second, The Building of a Brain, which, treating more broadly of what we may call educational hygiene, turns more especially on the same point to which the other was exclusively devoted. A brief abstract of the work will show its leading topics and purpose.

The essay is divided into three parts: I. Nature’s Working Plans, II. An Error in Female Building. III. A Glimpse at English Brain-Building.

Dr. Clarke startles us at the outset by saying that no human race has kept a permanent foothold on this continent, and that the Anglo-Saxon race will die out here like those which have preceded it, unless it can develop an organization and a brain equal to the demands made upon it by its conditions. — To keep up the race is not enough; the individual must also be developed to the highest point. Our common and high schools have fallen into the error of developing

one part of the organization at the expense of the rest.

“ Brains rule the world. ... A human brain is tlie last, the highest product, the ‘ consummate flower ’ of nature’s development on this planet.” Poor brains — “ automatic ganglia ” — will grew, like weeds, on any soil. The best brains are only built by “ educated evolution in accordance with the working plans that nature furnishes. . . . We know and only can know the mind through the brain. . . . The development of the soul and mind — of the ego — resolves itself into the development of the brain.” “ No perfect brain ever crowns an imperfectly developed body.” A brain “ cannot be made except as the crown of the rest of the body, and, to a large extent, out of the rest of the body.” An artist knows that if his fountain is properly built the water will flow properly through it. So, “ build the brain aright, and the divine spirit will inhabit and use it. Build it wrongly, and the devil will employ it.”

Dr. Clarke understands by the brain the whole cerebro-spinal axis, by education “ all that training, alike of the brain and of the body, which yields the just and harmonious development of every organ.” One of the indispensable objects of schools and colleges is to build a brain of the right sort, but “ many of them have thwarted and obstructed nature’s way of work. . . . Especially is this true with regard to American female education, which has looked upon a girl as if she were a boy, and trained her as if she were to have a boy’s destiny.” In the higher education in store for woman, her peculiar organization must not be ignored. The women must see to this themselves; the medical profession must be consulted, and for this, as well as other purposes, there should be a class of well-educated The Building of a Brain. By Edward H. Clarke, M. D., author of Sex in Education. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co. 1874. female physicians. After a short description of some of the wonderful structural characters of the brain, Dr. Clarke illustrates, by examples, on the one hand the constructive and conservative functions of the brain as the superintendent of the forming and the matured organism, and on the other hand its special thinking function, or, as he calls it, conscious or volitional cerebration.

Believing in the almost boundless possibilities of cerebral development, he considers the proper work of the brain as a thinking organ, or rather as the organ of “ intellection, emotion, and volition,” the most important factor in brain-building. It should not be attempted too early in life; if a hundred boys or girls were trained as John Stuart Mill was, the majority would either die or become invalids or imbeciles. This is the kind of cerebral training our schools have pushed to a dangerous extreme. If the single factor of cerebration, “ employing in its work only mathematics, the humanities, and the like,” is alone attended to, the organization will be sure to go astray.

And so we come to the doctrine specially enforced in the former essay. The education of the sexes should proceed on similar principles, but just so far as they differ in organization a difference must be made in their special adjustments. “ Identical education of the sexes is in the last analysis equivalent to an unjust discrimination between them. ... One result of a school system animated by such methods is to make a very poor kind of men out of women, and a very poor kind of women out of men.” The necessity of implicit obedience to the special laws which govern the movements of the female constitution is forcibly insisted on in the remaining pages of the first part of the book.

The second and longest part of Dr. Clarke’s work is one which does not so much invite as demand, and compel attention. It is chiefly made up of evidence hearing on the great ‘ ‘ error in female building,” to which the author called attention with such extraordinary results in his preceding essay. This evidence is derived from public documents, parents, and school-teachers, and from physicians. No one to whom the education of girls is entrusted can afford to overlook the facts here brought together, resting, as they do, on the testimony' of experts, and pointing to momentous practical conclusions in full agreement for the most part with those of Dr. Clarke’s widely discussed and sharply assailed Sex in Education. The letter from a mother included in this mass of evidence is a practical lesson so touchingly enforced that it will go to the heart of thousands of parents, and plead more eloquently for the immunities of womanhood than any other form of argument. Many young women may pass through the dangerous ordeal of forced education without manifest injury, as many soldiers go through a campaign unhurt ; evidence enough has been brought, forward to show that many do. But the fact remains that flying bullets and habitual neglect of physiological laws are always dangerous, and sometimes fatal.

The third part, of only a few pages, gives the results of some inquiries of a careful observer as to the methods of “brain-bulding” and constitutionbuilding commonly employed in the education of English girls.

Both Dr. Clarke’s books have a purpose so grave, so far-reaching, so forcibly supported, that it would be trifling with the reader to criticise them from a literary point of view. They have raised various interesting questions which must be left, for larger discussion elsewhere. No one can read what has been written in the controversies to which these essays have given rise, without noticing that a deep undercurrent of feeling betrays itself, with regard to the alleged physical disqualifications of women for keeping pace with the other sex in education and in various pursuits supposed to unfit her for or to interfere with her primal duties as the mother of mankind. No sensitiveness, no theories, and no aspirations must be allowed to stand in the way of the recognition of a law of nature. Dr. Clarke has shown, what few will deny, that this law has too often been overlooked in the education of American young women. He has told us how, as a physician, he has been a witness of the penalties exacted for its violation. Without taking ground openly against the co-educalion of the sexes, he has made out a strong case against it so far as he has established the principle that regular and considerable intervals of rest from bodily and mental labor and from emotional excitement are required by one sex which are not needed by the other. The facts bearing on this point have, for obvious reasons, been kept in the background, to the great known damage of individuals and probably to the injury of many who suffer from the same cause without suspecting it. A large mass of evidence is now before the public tending to support Dr. Clarke’s positions, coupled with not a little intended to weaken them. With all its contradictions, it can hardly fail to leave the conviction that the health of our women demands a more careful management of our girls with regard to special physiological conditions, which have been commonly enough winked wholly out of sight by our educators. As to identical education, it is obvious enough that this is a very loose expression. Until men are taught to sew and knit, to darn and patch, to trim dresses and make puddings, to plait ruffles and dress hair, to take charge of the household, nursery included, in case of need, it means nothing more than that young men and women should study many of the same things, and the only real question is, just how many. Identical co-education is still less likely to be literally carried out. It was tried in the noted instance of Achilles, with a result which was not felicitous, though by no means surprising.

Common sense, common prudence, common delicacy, will assert and in the long run maintain the distinction in the training of the sexes which nature indicates, and mind and body alike demand. Many of their studies will be identical; many may, at the proper ages and under proper regulations, be pursued in company. We do not separate the sexes at our churches as they do in Quaker meetings, as they did aforetime in certain rural ball-rooms while waiting for the solemnizing festivities to begin, or, as the local authorities would have said, to commence. If they can listen without harm in each others’ society to the impassioned discourse of a young and ardent preacher, there is no reason why they might not sit together to hear a calm lecture on congelation, or a tranquil account of the formation of glaciers, possibly a less refrigerating discourse from a discreet professor of geology, chemistry, or even anatomy, if the dry bones were the subject. Co-education and identical education in their full extent are quite absurd and chimerical. The discussion which Dr. Clarke has set going will do much to show what is the best practical line to be drawn between the sexes in our schools and colleges. That such a line must he drawn somewhere be has made plain enough if it was not plain before.

Dr. Clarke’s remark as to the disappearance of successive races from this continent, and his warning about our own race, suggests the subject to which a considerable part of this paper will be devoted. It is evident that the special question of education must be affected by any general conditions relating to the organization and vitality of the imported American.

The fact he refers to is no more than what has happened in most countries of the Old World. It is hard to find an autochthonous race anywhere except among the mountain fastnesses where, if at all, the remains of once powerful original races have survived the general destruction, or rather the disappearance, of the special type to which they belonged; as, for instance, the Basques among the Pyrenees. Human life has maintained itself, at any rate, on the American continent, and if one race has yielded to another, it has been to another native race, until the advent of the European threatened the extinction of all the indigenous inhabitants. Still, there is a prejudice against this continent as a home for white men, the origin of which we may find it worth our while to consider. For this purpose the following citations, from sources often vaguely referred to, are here brought together. Whatever of truth or of prejudice, of fact or of theory, of wisdom or of shallowness they show in their authors, they mean something collectively, and the reader can afford to look them over without losing his patience, and may possibly find himself amused with some of their absurdities.

The Pilgrims and other early colonists seem to have been well contented with the climate of New England. Winslow says, after three years’ experience, that he could hardly tell it from that of Old England in respect of heat and cold, frost, snow, rain, winds, etc. He thinks the winter is sharper and longer, but suggests that he may have been deceived by the want of those comforts he had left at home. In spite of all their hardships they have kept their health, he says, in a way that would be admired in England. Edward Johnson says the children “are as cheerful, fat, and lusty, with feeding upon those muscles, clams, and other fish, as they were in England with their fill of bread.” And good Mr. Higginson’s famous saying that “a sup of New England’s air is better than a whole draught of Old England’s ale” was flattering evidence in favor of the climate, but would have been more convincing if he had not added a practical comment upon it by dying in the course of little more than a year, “ of a hectic fever.”

The biogenic (life-producing) and biotrophic (life-supporting) conditions of America, and especially of its northern portion, during the first century and a half of its settlement, are only to be inferred from hints to be gathered here and there. That dour and troublesome Scotch doctor, William Douglas, “ always positive and sometimes accurate,” who kept Boston practitioners as constantly in hot water as some of his professional brethren have tried with less success to do since, says in his Summary (1753), that the children of Mew England are more forward and precocious than those of the Old World, and that instances of longevity are rarer; " fecundity identical.” No general accusation was brought against the New World as unfavorable to the development of animal life, none certainly that attracted much attention, until Buffon, in the ninth volume of his Natural History (1761), contrasted the vitality of the two continents to the disadvantage of the latter. America, he says, has very few native species of quadrupeds, and no animals as large as the elephant and rhinoceros, or as strong and fierce as the lion and the tiger. Her bears, her wolves, her deer, are all smaller than those of the Old World. Animal life in the New World is much less active, less varied, and, it may be said less vigorous. —The Swedish botanist Kalm, who was in this country from 1748 to 1751, stated his impressions of the people in language not very complimentary to their physical appearance. At Philadelphia one would suppose that men were of a different nature from Europeans. Their bodies and minds mature earlier and decay sooner. It is common to hear children answer with the good sense of adults, but it is rare to find old men of eighty years. Europeans degenerate perceptibly. Children born to them in America are less hardy than those born and bred in Europe. Women cease bearing children after thirty. — Cornelius de Pauw, a Dutchman, uncle of the noted Anacharsis Clootz, in his Recherches, etc. (1770), maintained the broad thesis that this continent is the seat of a race which has degenerated from its original type; that a people could not have been created in such a state of feebleness and decrepitude as he pretends is that of the aborigines.

After what we have seen of Buffon, we are surprised to find him in his Supplement (1777) arguing with great zeal and force against both these authors. He does not believe that men can degenerate in a country where Europeans multiply so rapidly as in America. He thinks Kalm’s observations have no better foundation than his story about the serpents that charm the squirrels and make them come and be swallowed. Regarding the imperfection of nature with which De Pauw gratuitously reproaches America, Buffon considers it as belonging only to the animals of the southern part of the continent. As to the human race, only strong and robust men, he says, have been found in Canada and all the other parts of North America, and the same thing is true of the native Californians. It seems as if this Supplement, in which Buffon appears as the advocate of the vitalizing energies of the New World in its northern half, had not been remembered by many of those who have quoted his earlier volume.

Dr. Robertson, in his History of America (1777), echoes the original statements of Buffon, and amplifies them by various quotations from other authorities. “ The principle of life seems to have been less active and vigorous there [in the New World] than in the ancient continent.” “ Nature was not only less prolific in the New World, but she appears likewise to have been less vigorous in her productions.” “ It is remarkable, however, that America, where the quadrupeds are so dwarfish and dastardly, should produce the condor, which is entitled to preëminence over all the flying tribe in bulk, in strength, and in courage.” An exception is very useful now and then. An interview with a Californian “ grizzly” would have suggested another exception, relating this time to quadrupeds. There are still some odd fancies in Europe about our country. Dean Ramsay tells us in the Preface to his very pleasant Reminiscences (1867), that “the North American woods, although full of birds of beautiful plumage, it is wellknown have no singing birds.”

The Abbé Raynal (1774) reproached America with not having produced a good poet, an able mathematician, or a man of genius in any art or science.

He was sharply controverted in his positions by Mr. Jefferson in his Notes on Virginia. In a later edition he makes an exception in favor of the northern part of America, probably here, as in the first instance, following the lead of Buffon. Lord Kames (1774), arguing for the original diversity of origin of mankind, maintains the general proposition that native races degenerate when transplanted. The European, he says, would die out at Charleston in Carolina, and in Jamaica, and “if continual recruits did not arrive from Europe to supply the places of those that perish, the countries would soon be depopulated.” Robert Knox (The Races of Men, 1850) maintains a similar doctrine.

The Reverend Samuel Stanhope Smith, President of the College of New Jersey, published in the year 1787 an Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. It is written partly from a theological and partly from a national point of view. He wishes to maintain the scriptural doctrine of the unity of the human race, and to defend, with Mr. Jefferson, “the people of the United States, and the aboriginals of the American continent, against the aspersions of Mr. Buffon, and the Abbé Raynal, and generally of the European writers who impute to them great debility both of mental and of bodily powers.” He believes that by the joint effects of climate and modes of life, the European may come to resemble the aboriginal native, and the Indian, on the other hand, to approximate very closely in physical characters to the Anglo-European. He recognizes a change in the aspect of our people from that of the stock from which they are derived. “ A certain paleness of countenance and softness of feature in the native American strikes a British traveller as soon as he arrives on our shores. Many exceptions there are, but in general the American complexion does not exhibit so clear a red and white as the British or the German.” “In general the habit of the Anglo-Americans is more slender than that of the natives of Great Britain or Ireland, from whom the greater part of our population is descended.”

These discussions were mainly confined to the years just preceding, including and following the American Revolution. A few stray observations of travellers may be added. The Reverend Andrew Burnaby, who travelled in America in 1759—60, speaks of the women as of fair and delicate complexion, but as having universally, and even proverbially, bad teeth. Thomas Aubrey (1789) notices the same defect in Americans, which he attributes to the use of molasses. De Beaumont (1825) and Mrs. Trollope (1831) notice the fragile and transient character of female beauty. — Miss Martineau (1837) found that vigorous health prevailed only in the elevated parts of the Alleghany range, in the State of Michigan, and perhaps, she says, she might add, among the ladies of Charleston. Invalidism seemed almost a matter of course. Causes, more or less directly suggested, climate, want of exercise, anthracite fires, hot bread, cakes, pickles, preserves, too much meat, mental anxiety in males and vacuity in females. — Captain Marryatt (1839) is very outspoken; thinks the Americans are not equal to the English in strength or form; that they are taller than Europeans, hut not muscular in proportion, and that one peculiar defect, namely, narrowness of the shoulders, is common to both sexes. “ Their climate, therefore, I unhesitatingly pronounce to be bad, being injurious to them in the two important points of healthy vigor in the body and healthy action of the mind, enervating the one and tending to demoralize the other.” Sir Charles Lyell (1849) remarks on the less ruddy and robust look of the American than the Englishman, which he also attributes to the climate. — Anthony Trollope (1862) finds the Englishman losing his rosy cheeks, becoming thin in face and figure, and caring less for exercise after some years’ residence in this country. He wants less nourishing and stimulating food and drink, and becomes more sensitive to outside impressions. Another travelling Englishman remarks on the want of fulness in the nape of the neck as a characteristic of the American.

To counterbalance these statements of opinions and impressions, we have a mass of evidence relating to one class of our population, which shows the danger of drawing hasty conclusions from taking a look at a people. It is true that the men who present themselves for examination to enter the army are in the vigor of their years, and by the mere fact of their being candidates shown to be select and not average members of the community. Still they furnish on the whole a fair enough type of the physical organization of our people, and contrasted with the candidates of other nationalities give us a very significant result.

The late Surgeon - General of the United States Army, Dr. William A. Hammond, says (1861): “The present inhabitants of the United States are of European descent, and are mainly natives of the soil, the emigration not being sufficient in a generation to make any decided impression. In stature, in girth of chest, in powers of endurance, they will compare favorably with the inhabitants of any country in the world. In fact, as the result of over fifteen thousand observations, embracing the chief points desirable in a collection of vital statistics, I am enabled to assert that so far as physical development is concerned, it is very doubtful if any people in the world excel those of the Northern States.” “ Who can doubt that the activity both of mind and body, the ceaseless energy, the superb physical development of the people are due to the commingling of the blood of all the nations of Europe? ”

The most extensive series of anthropological data, probably, that was ever brought together is to be found in the Investigations in the Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers, by Benjamin Apthorp Gould, Actuary to the United States Sanitary Commission. Here we get quantitative values in place of general impressions. A few of these will interest the reader. Chart H, showing the mean statures for men of different nativities, ranks them as follows: The tallest men were 1, from Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois; then came successively 2, New England; 3, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania; 4, British Provinces; 5, Scotland; 6, England; 7, Germany. In Chart I Kentucky and Ohio are at the top of the list, having the tallest men of any section of the Union. France is at the bottom, about the same as Germany, and Ireland is between England and Scotland. In weight, Table III., the men of Kentucky and Tennessee stood highest, averaging, leaving off fractions, 150 pounds; Ohio and Indiana 146, nearly; New England 140; England, Scotland, France, Belgium, etc., all between 138 and 139; Ireland 141. The mean girth of the neck measured on nearly ten thousand men was 13.633 inches. The smallest observed mean value was for New Englanders, 13.44; and the largest for Germans, 13.79. The breadth between the summits of the shoulders (acromion processes) was 12.700 inches for natives of Kentucky and Tennessee; 12.377 for New England; 12.436 for England; 12.241 for Scotland; 12.459 for Ireland; 12.288 for France; 12.308 for Germany. The ratio of weight to stature gave, in pounds to the inch, Ohio and other Western States 2.185; New England 2.121; England and Scotland 2.118; Ireland 2.144; Germany 2.168. The comparison of the condition of the teeth between Americans and Englishmen gives a result as follows: New Englanders, “good,” “ fair,” or “medium,” 851 ; “ poor ” or “bad,” 149 in a thousand. Englishmen, good or fair, 821; poor or bad, 168. The best condition of the teeth was found in the white men from the slave States west of the Mississippi River, 950 in the thousand being reckoned as “ good.” Next to these came “miscellaneous,” and then Scotland, 915 “ good ” or “ fair ” in the thousand.

The Report of Dr. Baxter, chief medical purveyor of the United States army, is said to be nearly ready for publication, and promises additional statistics to those just referred to, deduced from the physical examination of nearly two million men.

In the Statistics of the United States for 1860. at page 524, is given a “ Lifetable for the white population of the United States,” which is prefaced by the following remark: —

“ Comparing the result with other life-tables, we find that it lies between those of continental Europe and one for English healthy life in selected counties; but it ranges decidedly above the general table for England and Wales, which is attributed chiefly to the larger proportion of the British nation that reside in manufacturing towns and cities. And so far as correctstatistics can be obtained in very large numbers, the average duration of life is found to be above that of any other nation.”

Mr. Elizur Wright, whose evidence as a consulting actuary of experience in these matters is peculiarly valuable, informs the writer that in most of the American life insurance companies the mortuary experience has been a little better than that on which the “ combined experience table ” of the British companies was founded. But he mentions certain sources of fallacy in comparing the results which would have to be weighed if we were giving the subject a more extended consideration.

Few subjects would repay investigation better than that of human development and health, at different ages and in the two sexes in the different regions of America. If we knew half as much of man on this continent as Agassiz has taught us of turtles (tortoises) or his son has taught us of echinoderms, we should be most fortunate. The works referred to contain a vast collection of fails pour servir, but it wants half a dozen young lives to be devoted to working out the problem in the various sections of the country for comparison with the other hemisphere, and then we shall be ready to say whether or not we are on the wrong half of the planet, like the illconditioned creatures that hide beneath the white under side of a pumpkin. There was a hope at one time that an observer of great ability, Dr. Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia, would be neglected long enough to have leisure to carry out the inquiries he had begun. But the people of the Quaker City have found out what the colleges seem not to have discovered, and have given him so much to do as a practitioner, that he can hardly be expected to complete the investigations foreshadowed in the tabular questions he drew up and distributed in different parts of the country.

Quite independently of the statistical results which have been given, we have more familiar evidence bearing on the question, which may he taken for what it is worth.

It can be proved clearly enough that the imported American race, properly cared for and with fortunate crosses of blood, can not only continue itself, but can also develop exceptionally fine types of manhood and womanhood. This has been shown by tracing known families through several generations. An old college friend of the most extraordinary muscular development was the great - greatgrandson of an ailing invalid clergyman, was of pure New England blood, and counted two professors of Harvard College among his lineal ancestors. Our countrymen’s record in the prize-ring may not be morally enviable, but it is far from discreditable to their thews and sinews. We know the good show our young men have made as rowers and ball-players. We raise our own giants and fat women for the sideshows. The heaviest man, probably, on record, before whom Daniel Lambert and Edward Bright would have had to hide their diminished obesities, whose impressive obituary the sceptic may find in Appleton’s New American Cyclopaedia, was Miles Darden, born in North Carolina. At his death, in 1857, he is said to have weighed a little over one thousand pounds. As to longevity, a good instance of what the climate is capable of is close at hand. The four grandparents, all native New Englanders, of certain young persons very near by, averaged eighty-three years and three quarters, at their death, their respective ages being seventy-four, eighty, eighty-eight, and ninety-three. One of our best known public men, of the truest New England type, traces his direct descent in the male line through seven ancestors whose age averaged more than eighty-four years. Timothy Pickering, Washington’s Secretary of War, born in Salem, Massachusetts, was one of nine children whose average age was within a few weeks of eighty-three years. Dr. Edward Augustus Holyoke, son of one of the Presidents of Harvard College, born in Marblehead, near Salem, was publicly entertained and responded to the sentiment offered in his honor, upon his hundredth birthday. Good minister Charles Cleveland was walking alone about our Boston streets a few years ago at the age of ninety-nine. Judge Paine Wingate, who graduated at Harvard College in 1759, died in 1838, aged nearly ninety-nine years, and his wife, in 1843 at the age of one hundred years and eight months. These instances, exceptional and not exceptional, are brought forward to show that the climate and its conditions have nothing incompatible with luxuriant and even extreme development and with protracted life, and they are only such as were accidentally suggested without any express searching for them.

On the other hand, we must recognize a strong tendency in American families to run down and run out, not peculiar by any means to American families, but, it may be suspected, more marked in them than in the stock from which they came. There are more men and women, or what pass for such, in an average American community, who show an apparent falling off in original force of development and in vital capital, than in a corresponding English one. Such at least is a very general impression among us. A friend who has often combated the opinion, said that when he got into a street car here after his recent return from a long visit to Europe, he felt on looking round as if he must be going with a load of patients to the hospital. We all remember Hawthorne’s repeated allusions in The Scarlet Letter and in Our Old Home to the slightness of American women as contrasted with the massive and ruddy aspect of the women of England.

Man, meaning woman especially, is a forced fruit in these latitudes. In England he is raised in a cold or moderately warmed greenhouse; in New England and the latitudes corresponding to it, in a hot-house, in both cases under glass. We have only four or five months of the year in which artificial heat can be dispensed with. Apart from mere temperature, the dry atmosphere, the effects of which were pointed out by M. Desor in a very interesting essay, the peculiarities of a new soil, the meteorological changes, the electrical and many other little known conditions, might lead us to expect, a priori, that the new country would breed a new type of humanity. That it has done so, the authorities cited, common observation, characteristic portraits, the ideals of national caricaturists, agree in showing. Better or worse may be questioned if we choose, but different, certainly. Arrest of lateral expansion seems to be a frequent characteristic of the bony framework. Defective nutrition, as shown by meagre outlines, is a prevalent failing. When there is high color in the cheeks it is apt to have more of lake and less of carmine than we see in the Englishman. Imperfect development and action of the oil-secreting organs account for a very common dryness of the skin and hair, and in many of our women show themselves in the partial atrophy and utter uselessness of the glands upon which the young American depends for his daily allowance of butter.

The attempts to account for all these physiological changes have varied according to the wooden quadruped on which the prancing theorist, commonly enough a cheap lecturer, was mounted. They might be compared to the famous “bow wow” theory in linguistics, for homeliness of origin. There is the “ pie and pickle ” theory, the “ saleratus ” theory, and the “ hot-bread ” or “ Johnny-cake ” theory; the “food-bolting ” theory, the “ corset” theory, the “ thin shoes ” theory, the “hot-air-furnace ” theory, the “ want of exercise” theory, each of which has some pretext for asserting itself. Allowing all due weight to these alleged causes of degeneration and invalidism, they do not seem to account for the generally recognized fact that an American is different in physiognomical and physiological qualities, after a very few generations, from the European race that gave birth to his ancestors. He may eat beans in Beverly or sweet potatoes in Savannah; he may dine on salt fish at Cape Ann or opossum in Virginia; he may wade through the snowbanks half-way up Mount Washington or sprawl under the orange-trees of Florida; he may rock in his dory off the sands of Swampscott or float on his raft between the banks of the Mississippi; do what he will, go where he will, live as he will, America puts her stamp upon him, and all over the personality of every mother’s son she claims as her genuine product one may read her E pluribus unum.

No doubt there is a very great difference in stature, forms, and other personal traits in Americans born in different sections of the country. But on the whole the type is a new one, not Celtic, not Saxon in their old patterns, but itself — as new in certain points as the Seckel pear or the Hovey seedling strawberry. We cannot attribute so general a fact to any but a very general cause, and the only cause wide enough in its compass is what we call climate, which carries with it. a great deal besides merely the weather. It is always to be borne in mind, as Sir Charles Lyell has remarked, that it may take a considerable number of generations before the European shall become completely acclimated in America. All our results must be therefore held to some extent conditioned by this possibility.

It is pretty generally agreed that our people have more of the nervous and less of the sanguine temperament than their English ancestors. The tendency of our social conditions is to stimulate the nervous system, and the deficient blood-making power too often fails to support, it in its forced exertions. Here are the special reasons why “ brainbuilding” has proved with us so difficult and delicate a problem, especially in the schools where our girls are educated. The blood is to the brain what the water and the fire are to the steamengine; not merely one, but both, and even more than both. It furnishes the engine itself and keeps it in repair, It carries the fuel to be burned and the tire to burn it. By four great pipes it pumps up the floods of circulating fluid which are as needful as the materials they carry with their current. The “high service” is the first to fail in case of a short supply; when one faints, first he grows pale, then he loses consciousness, then he falls to the ground; the high service becomes the low service, and he comes to himself again.

No sound working brain, then, without enough good blood to build it, repair it, and furnish the materials for those molecular changes which are the conditions essential to all nervous actions, intellectual and volitional as well as those of lower grade. No good blood without a proper amount of proper food and air to furnish materials, and healthy organs to reduce a sufficient quantity of these materials to a state fit to enter the circulation. No healthy organs, strictly speaking, except from healthy parents and developed and maintained by proper stimuli, nourishment, and use. No healthy parents — no help for it. We are, of course, applying the term healthy to the brain as signifying much more than freedom from disease. A healthy brain should show, by the outward signs of clear, easily working intelligence, well-balanced faculties, and commanding will, that its several organs, if such there be, or its several modes of action, if it works as a whole, are properly developed and adjusted by themselves and in relation to each other.

If we could only bespeak a brain for one of the freshman class of 1890 as we lay out for an unborn colt to run for a cup in two or three years! But we have to take the brains as they come, and the range of difference is so enormous that one is tempted to say there is no such thing in the abstract as a good education. Have we not seen young men who had been for three whole years rained on with professional teachings of all kinds, upon whom the axioms of science had been dropping long enough to wear hollows in a stone, and who have come out of the showers of instruction with intellects as dry of knowledge as if Mr. Mackintosh had furnished each of their brains with an impermeable dura-mater ?

A brain, like a watch, is to a considerable extent a product of skill and industry. Every well-built brain inherits a certain amount of these qualities from the series of civilized thinking marrows to which it belongs. The good watches come from the brains and hands of thoughtful and skilful workmen, and the thoughtfulness and skill that are ticking in your watch-pocket are working in the brain-case of their children, unless some other blood has the mastery there. No one need expect a cheap watch to keep exact time, and yet we are constantly trying to pile an education beyond its needs on cheaply - built brains that cannot support it. Some of our professional schools require no evidence of training or knowledge for admission; the consequences are utter failure with a considerable number of students to send them forth decently equipped for their work, an injury to those with whom they study, and worst of all, the gradual mental deterioration of the teacher. Cripples never go to dancing schools, but crippled brains are common in our higher educational institutions, where they have no business. They must be kept out by sufficiently rigorous preliminary examinations, and then the army that is in training for the fight with ignorance will not be overburdened, as it now is, with crutches and ambulances.

This is the first organic difficulty, and it can only be got rid of at the expense of the individual. It is more troublesome in America than elsewhere, on account of the virulence of bite of the social œstrum which makes everybody want to scramble up to a place one or more degrees above the one he was meant for. Nature has established caste, and as soon as we are crowded enough and experienced enough in the necessities of civilized life, we shall find out the fact and act upon it. By caste we do not mean, of course, impassable barriers of rank, or any form of social exclusiveness, but the distribution of men according to their capacities, which will draw its lines more and more exactly and maintain them more and more permanently. The building of cities often begins with wood and ends with marble. The building of brains in the earlier stages of civilization works pretty largely in the first-named of the two, but the time must come when the higher institutions of learning will have done with it, and insist on better material.

The brains to be built upon being given, their ground-plan designed, and their foundations laid, the question of how the work shall go on so as to develop the intellect and character in harmony with all the laws of the organization is the great problem occupying the minds of those who are interested in education, that is, of many of the best thinkers in the community. The education of girls presents its special difficulties and is the hardest to deal with. Dr. Clarke has introduced some elements into the discussion which had hardly ventured to show themselves in it before he exercised his privilege as a physician in telling what his observation had taught him as a man of large experience. The rhythmical movements in the life of woman not only involve all her bodily conditions, but reach to the very springs of her mental and moral nature. We constantly see in our hospitals women who have been turned into liars anil cheats by functional disturbances which react upon the brain, and lead to a well-known course of what seems at first sight unaccountably perverse behavior, for which those who did not know the seven devils of hysteria would hold them morally responsible. But all this is only the excess of what betrays itself more or less generally in connection with the special conditions of womanhood. The argumentum ad feminam is even more delicate to handle than the obnoxious argumentum ad hominem. But it had to be brought up as an essential element in the problem of education, and to judge by the general character of the evidence from very numerous and very various sources it has called forth, it has put a new face on the old question. The interest the subject has excited has reached the Old World, as may be seen in Dr. Maudsley’s article in the Fortnightly Review, and in an elaborate paper in the Westminster Review which has reached us since this article was in type.

We have heard a great deal, perhaps not too much, of late years, of the rights of woman. Among her rights are the immunities she is privileged to claim, and she must not let the substance fall in grasping for the shadow. It may be very desirable that she should vote, but it is not essential to the tolerably comfortable existence of society. It is essential that she should be the mother of healthy children, well developed in body and mind. It is not essential that she should know as much as man knows, or produce as much by her ordinary labor of mind or body as he does. It is essential that she should save her strength for the exhausting labors which fall to her lot as woman, and which render latent, to use the old chemical phrase, an amount of vitality of which men have but a very imperfect conception. Woman has often enough had a hard time of it. As a girl she has had to stand up in her class when a soldier would have been excused from appearing on parade if he had had half as much to complain of. Later in life she has been worn out by the cumulated shocks of close-crowded maternity, until there was not life enough left for her own exhausted organism. The sad fate of too many overworked girls and overweighted mothers recalls the touching lines of Milton in his Epitaph on the Marchioness of Winchester.

came bearing the wreath of orange-blossoms,

Time at last brought the hour of woman’s trial to the slender frame which had been for years unfitting itself for the duties of maternity,

and severed the thread of life already worn to a mere filament.

Oftener, perhaps, the cypress bud has been interwoven with the maiden’s garland of school triumphs, as in the case of poor Mary, whose story is told in the little book before us. It is a piteous ending

The priest has had nothing for woman but a curse and a command. It remained for the physician to speak for her, and this is what Dr. Clarke has done in his two essays, contributions to educational hygiene which cannot fail by their direct and indirect agency to produce a wide and enduring effect on public opinion.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.