The point which above all others I wish to make is this,
that owing chiefly to peculiarities of climate, our growing girls are
endowed with organizations so highly sensitive and impressionable that
we expose them to needless dangers when we attempt to overtax them
mentally. In any country the effects of such a course must be evil, but
in America I believe it to be most disastrous.
As I have spoken of climate in the broad sense as accountable for some
peculiarities of the health of our women, so also would I admit it as
one of the chief reasons why work among men results so frequently in
tear as well as wear. I believe that something in our country makes
intellectual work of all kinds harder to do than it is in Europe; and
since we do it with a terrible energy, the result shows in wear very
soon, and almost always in the way of tear also. Perhaps few persons who
look for evidence of this fact at our national career alone will be
willing to admit my proposition, but among the higher intellectual
workers, such as astronomers, physicists, and naturalists, I have
frequently heard this belief expressed, and by none so positively as
those who have lived on both continents. Since this paper was first
written I have been at some pains to learn directly from Europeans who
have come to reside in America how this question has been answered by
their experience.
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