memory is assiduously cultivated to procure
present remembrance, without regard to the
method or the permanence of recollection.
The feelings that most adorn and beautify
the female character—that sanctify, in all
hearts not brutal, the social relations of
woman, are left to struggle to maturity as
they may; and the girl's probable future is
ignored, until the arrival of a child's valentine,
or the second chance meeting with a
hobbarddehoy, is invested with the romance
of an adventure and with the gravity of a
crime. An explanation of all this, Mr.
Pestle thinks, is to be found in the fact that
parents trust to the presumed skill of
teachers, and accept superficial acquirements
as a criterion of success. To obtain them in
the easiest and cheapest way becomes the
object of competing schools, with reference
only to the fallacious test adopted by the
public. Before the true test is applied by
the events of life, time and circumstances have
obscured the links between the child and the
adult. The religion that produces no
humility and affords no support, the
uncontrolled impulses and feelings that work so
much misery in the world, the intellects that
are inadequate to simple duties—all these
are familiar to those who look for them.
How far they depend upon the inherent
weaknesses of human nature—how far upon
defective early training, is a question that
does not admit of precise determination. As
long, however, as early training is visibly
defective, such results may be expected from
its short-comings, and may, in some measure
at least, be ascribed to them. As long as
schools can be improved, the time for calling
upon Hercules has not yet come.

That girls' schools are susceptible of
improvement, we imagine few grown-up women,
who have had experience of them, will be
found to deny. The scholastic profession,
like some others, needs a stimulus from without.
Necessarily guided by empiricism in
bygone times, its members are unwilling to
recognise a more safe foundation for their
art. Grinding on, year after year, in the
same weary circle of monotonous routine,
they are dazzled by the light which science
would throw upon their track. For, indeed,
through examination of the principles which
have been found to govern the development
of the human body, and the gradual unfolding
of the faculties of the human mind, a true
educational law may be laid down,—a law
adapted alike to masses and to individuals,
providing for the exceptional cases to which
it points, limited to no system, working
by no narrow rule, but requiring intelligent
action from those who would utilise its vast
simplicity. From it springs the necessity for
coupling health with education. It repudiates
that tripartite division of the human creature
in which so many seem practically to believe,
and which assigns the soul to the minister,
the mind to the teacher, and leaves only the
body to the physician. It teaches that these
portions of the whole are too intimately
blended in their workings to be separated by
human ken, and that none of them can be
disregarded in dealing with the others. It
teaches that the visible evidences of mind,
and the means of influencing them through
outward agencies, are entirely dependent
upon the integrity of the brain—the organ
which materialists deem to be the source, and
spiritualists the instrument, of the higher
faculties. The integrity of the brain is equally
dependent upon the welfare of the body, or,
in other words, upon health; and whatever
deranges or destroys health, will disturb or
pervert the intellectual operations. Moreover,
the brain, like any other member of the
system, requires food, rest, and regular
employment of all its powers, in order to its
symmetrical and healthy growth. Through
failure in the last respect—an event lamentably
common—we may recognise a sort of
mental distortion, or one-sided growth, which
must always curtail usefulness, and which
often predisposes to insanity. To overload
the memory, for instance, while the power of
reflection remains dormant and unexercised,
is to copy the faquir, who stands upon one leg
until the other is useless and inert.

Our present knowledge of the laws of
health and growth being the result of patient
inquiries extended over many years—inquiries
of which the earlier results are pretty
generally known, while those last attained are, as
yet, more or less confined to their
enunciators—it follows, almost of necessity, that
in a school conducted upon the good old plan
there are some practices that everybody
knows to be wrong, and some—perhaps
equally hurtful—that many persons would
defend. The first class have, generally speaking,
direct reference to the bodily welfare of
the pupils, and include matters of diet,
temperature, ventilation, and various domestic
regulations. Abuses in these things are often
traceable, as we have already hinted, to a
desire for improper cheapness—that modern
Moloch whose worship causes our sons and
our daughters to pass through the fire indeed.
Teachers practise, and parents tacitly sanction,
what they well know to be wrong—each
individual expecting to escape a penalty of
which the payment is not quite certain.
Reform is only to be hoped for through a
general conviction that all tampering with
health is bad economy, and will cost money
in the end. Even then the present would
often outweigh the future, on the principle
laid down by sanitary reformers. People,
they say, will only take proper care for the
preservation of their bodies when they extend
the same foresight to their souls. A conviction
of the general hopelessness of the case induces
us to be content with a single illustration of
these mal-practices, and to select the one that
is perhaps easiest of remedy. Where girls
sleep eight or ten in a small room, a change