which I should like to see the full force of public opinion directed. There is no public school in the kingdom where a boy of sixteen would be permitted to work from eleven to eighteen hours a day, with no other exercise than a few minutes' walk. Is it not, then, simply monstrous that a girl should be allowed to do so? I must confess that I have met with wonderfully few cases of serious break down. All my informants tell me that, even under the operation of so insane an abuse as I have quoted, grave impairment of health but rarely occurs. This, however, only goes to show of what good stuff our English girls are made; and therefore may be taken to furnish about the strongest answer I can give to the argument which I am considering-viz., that the strength of an average English girl is not to be trusted for sustaining any reasonable amount of intellectual work. Upon this point, however, there is at the present time a conflict of medical authority, and as I have no space to give a number of quotations it must suffice to make a few general remarks.

In the first place, the question is one of fact, and must therefore be answered by the results of the large and numerous experiments which are now in progress; not by any à priori reasoning of a physiological kind. In the next place, even as thus limited, the inquiry must take account of the wisdom or unwisdom with which female education is pursued in the particular cases investigated. As already remarked, I have been myself astonished to find so great an amount of prolonged endurance exhibited by young girls who are allowed to work at unrea

sonable pressure; but, all the same, I should of course regard statistics drawn from such cases as manifestly unfair. And seeing that every case of health impaired is another occasion given to the enemies of female education, those who have the interests of such education at heart should before all things see to it that the teaching of girls be conducted with the most scrupulous precautions against over-pressure. Regarded merely as a matter of policy, it is at the present moment of far more importance that girls should not be overstrained than that they should prove themselves equal to young men in the class lists. For my own part, I believe that, with reasonable precautions against overpressure, and with due provision for bodily exercise, the higher education of women would ipso facto silence the voice of medical opposition. But I am equally persuaded that this can never be the case until it becomes a matter of general recognition among those to whom such education is intrusted, that no girl should ever be allowed to work more than eight hours a day as a maximum; that even this will in a large proportional number of cases be found to prove excessive; that without abundant exercise higher education should never be attempted; and that, as a girl is more liable than a boy to insidiously undermine her constitution, every girl who aspires to any distinction in the way of learning should be warned to be constantly on the watch for the earliest symptoms of impairment. If these reasonable precautions were to become as universal in the obser

vance as they now are in the breach, I believe it would soon stand upon

unquestionable evidence of experimental proof, that there is no reason in the nature of things why women should not admit of culture as wide and deep and thorough as our schools and universities are able to provide.

The channels, therefore, into which I should like to see the higher education of women directed are not those which run straight athwart the mental differences between men and women which we have been considering. These differences are all complementary to one another, fitly and beautifully joined together in the social organism. If we attempt to disregard them, or try artificially to make of woman an unnatural copy of man, we are certain to fail, and to turn out as our result a sorry and disappointed creature who is neither the one thing nor the other. But if, without expecting women as a class to enter into any professional or otherwise foolish rivalry with men for which as a class they are neither physically nor menItaly fitted, and if, as Mrs. Lynn Linton remarks, we do not make the mistake of confusing mental development with intellectual specialization-if, without doing either of these things, we encourage women in every way to obtain for themselves the intrinsic advantages of learning, it is as certain as anything can well be that posterity will bless us for our pains. For then all may equally enjoy the privilege of a real acquaintance with letters; ladies need no longer be shut out from a solid understanding of music or painting; lecturers on science will no longer be asked at the close of their lectures whether the cerebellum is inside or outside of the skull, how is

it that astronomers have been able to find out the names of the stars, or whether one does not think that his diagram of a jelly-fish serves with admirable fidelity to illustrate the movements of the solar system. These, of course, I quote as extreme cases, and even as displaying the prettiness which belongs to a childlike simplicity. But simplicity of this kind ought to be put away with other childish things; and in whatever measure it is allowed to continue after childhood is over, the human being has failed to grasp the full privileges of human life. Therefore, in my opinion the days are past when any enlightened man ought seriously to suppose that in now again reaching forth her hand to eat of the tree of knowledge woman is preparing for the human race a second fall. In the person of her admirable representative, Mrs. Fawcett, she thus pleads: "No one of those who care most for the woman's movement cares one jot to prove or to maintain that men's brains and women's brains are exactly alike or exactly equal. All we ask is that tho social and legal status of women should be such as to foster not to suppress, any gift, for art, literature, learning, or goodness with which women may be endowed.” Then I say, give her the apple and see what comes of it. Unless I am greatly mistaken, the result will be that which is so philosophically as well as so poetically portrayed by the Laureate:

The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink

Together, dwarf'd or god-like, bond or

free.

Then let her make herself her own

To give or keep, to live and learn to be
All that not harms distinctive womanhood.

For woman is not undeveloped man,
Bat diverse: could we make her as the man,
Sweet Love were slain: his dearest bond is
this,

Not like to like, but like in difference.
Yet in the long years liker must they grow;
The man be more of woman, she of man;
He gain in sweetness and in moral height,
Nor lose the wrestling thews that throw
the world;

She mental breadth, nor fail in childward

care,

Nor lose the child-like in the larger mind;
Till at the last she set herself to man,
Like perfect music unto noble words.
Then comes the statelier Eden back to men:
Then reign the world's great bridals,
chaste and calm:

Then springs the crowning race of human kind.

May these things be!

suggest that a personal element entered into their warp and woof instead of the mechanical action of unfeeling iron and steam. Reclining in Oriental ease on the cushioned carpets, one can easily dispense with chairs, as he quaffs the aromatic tumbâk of Shiraz in a silver kaliân, and gazes languidly on the mighty ranges of Elburz, towering grandly above the forests of Ghilân and the red roofs of Rescht. Around the side of our apartments was a broad veranda overlooking the gardens, and a highly pictur esque Imâm Zadé, or tomb of a saint, canopied by the massive foliage of a venerable chinâr. Every evening we were entertained by the magnificent voices of a man and a boy, who sang the call to prayers, one from the roof of the bath, the other from the veranda adjoining our rooms. They seemed to vie in respond

CURRENT THOUGHT.

A PERSIAN PARADISE.-Mr. S. W. G. Benjamin, late Minister of the U. S. to Persia, has just put forth a book, entitled Persia and the Persians, describing the country and the people as he saw them about five years ago. Upon one occasion he was a gest in the palace of the Governor of Rescht, of which he says:

"I do not here insist that the workmanship there displayed was in all respects finished after Western notions, for the tools of the Persians are rude; but I noticed everywhere a genius sensitive to artistic effects, a keen and poetic appreciation of beauty, and a consummate adaptation of climatic needs to the materials at hand. And I must frankly say that I gained more genuine artistic satisfaction out of the provincial residence at Rescht than from the most sumptuous structures I have ever seen in the United States Everywhere I saw beauty combined with a feeling of repose; in a word adaptation, simplicity, and thorough artistic effect. On the floors the richest carpets Persia can boast allured the eye, and upon these the mattresses were laid. Everywhere the foot moved silently on velvet, woven into the most exquisite and irregularly regular designs, which

with the full-throated metallic ring of their cadences. The air seemed dead after the echo of their song had died away on the twilight calm.”

ABLUTIONS IN EGYPT.-Mr. Alfred J. Butler, Fellow of Brazenose College, Oxford, received about half a dozen years ago the appointment of tutor to the young princes, sons of the then Khedive of Egypt. He has just put forth a gossipy volume, entitled Court Life in Egypt. One incident is an account of the manner in which a high official of the court was wont to perform his morning ablutions:

"His first operation, before proceeding to wash, was to swathe his body round and round in ban''s of flannel up to the very throat. Having thus guarded him. self against the contact of the water, he gently dabbed his cheeks and hands, dried himself, and was clean. For his hair he had a pair of brushes, which he used as follows: filling his mouth as full as it would hold with water, he spurted it all out suddenly on the brushes, and then whisked and whirled them about his head."

ENGLISH RAILWAYS FORTY-FIVE YEARS AGO.-In 1843, twelve years after the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester line, about two thousand miles of line had been built in great Britain. Mr. W. M. Ackworth gives, in Murray's Magazine, some curious notices of the "Infant Rail

roads" of that peried. Thus-“There is nothing which strikes one more forcibly in the perusal of the railway literature of this period than the entire unconsciousness even of railway men themselves of the revolution they were working. Nowhere is this better shown than in the different methods that were proposed for conducting the traffic. Practically the locomotive, as we have it to day, capable of working up to 1.000 horse-power, was already there. The multitublar boiler and the steamblast had long been in common use. But neither the public nor even the specialists were convinced that the right system had been hit upon. To say nothing of a 'patent aerial steam-carriage which is to convey passengers, goods, and dispatches through the air, performing the journey between London and India in four days, and traveling at the rate of 75 to 100 miles per hour,' all kinds of substitutes for locomotives were being sought for. One day the Globe reports that a 'professional gentleman at Hammersmith has invented an entirely new system of railway carriage, which may be propelled without the aid of steam at an extraordinary speed exceeding 60 miles an hour, with comparative safety without oscillation, which will no doubt become the ordinary mode of railway traveling for short distances, as the railway and carriages may be constructed and kept in repair for less than one-fourth of the usual expense.' Another day the Edinburgh and Glasgow railway have, says a Scotch writer, the discernment to employ Mr. Davidson, a gentleman of much practical knowledge and talent,' to construct for them an electro-magnetic carriage. The carriage, 16 feet long by 7 feet wide, was duly placed upon the rails, and 'propelled by eight powerful electromagnets, about a mile and a half long the railway, traveling at the rate of upward of 4 miles an hour, a rate which might be increased by giving greater power to the batteries, and enlarging the diameter of the wheels.' "The practicability of the scheme is (we are assured) placed beyond doubt, and its simplicity, economy, safety, and compactness render it a far more valuable motive power than that clumsy, dangerous, and costly machine the steamengine.'

THE NEAPOLITANS.-Under the title of

"Unromantic Naples," Mr. Holcombe Ingleby gives, in Murray's Magazine, an altogether unflattering representation of the population of Naples. He says:

"The visitor, who uses his faculties of observation is not long in making the discovery that the Neapolitan is of a different race to the dwellers in the surroanding country, and he is probably amused to hear with what scorn he is spoken of by his neighbors. No greater insult can be offered to a man hailing from Procida or Capri, or one of the insignificant neighboring islands, than to assume him to be a Neapolitan. And so finely is this distinction drawn, that the people dwelling in Santa Lucia, the very heart of Naples, decline to be classified as Neapolitans. In fact, the different Sezioni, or districts into which Naples is divided, speak a distinguishable patois; and though a stranger has some difficulty in discovering why the Luciani consider themselves superior to the other sections of the community, there is obviously a wide difference between an inhabitant of Naples and an ordinary Italian. In the first place, the Court of Naples in the Bourbon times always spoke French or Neapolitan, and utterly discountenanced Italian. Nothing that could be done to keep Naples Neapolitan was omitted, and everything that could be done to distinguish it from Italian was done. Hence the difference in race was widely accentuated. The Italian learned to look upon the Neapolitan with something more than disfavor. But there is a much more intelligible reason, and one which the stranger is not slow to discover for himself. For lying and cheating, the true Neapolitan has no equal; his ways are as childlike and bland as those of our friend the heathen Chinee, and it is a marvel if, in any transaction, he does not succeed with equal cunning in transferring some of your cash to his own pocket without an adequate quid pro quo. Even the Jew is found to be beaten at his own game here, and has never gained a foothold in Naples. Self-respect and shamefacedness are unknown to the Neapolitan; he preserves the most unruffled demeanor in the face of being caught in downright robbery. It is scarcely to be wondered at, then, that his more upright neighbor protests against being confounded with a race he despises."

THE ENGLISH NONJURORS.*

IN TWO PARTS.-PART I.

Of the problems left by primitive Christianity for future generations to solve, the widest, and if we may judge from experience the most perplexing, is the adaptation of its principles to the various provinces of human life and conduct. The right application to these of the law of the kingdom of Heaven is certainly not among the things which are revealed to babes. In this field of action, mere conscientiousness or rectitude of intention is sure preservative from error. Mistakes, often carrying with them the most disastrous consequences, even wrecking the usefulness of individuals and the peace of communities, mark the historical course of the Church, and testify that only at the cost of many futile experiments and pernicious failures has progress in this practical science been achieved. The reason of this is not far to seek. Contrasted with Judaism, and indeed with all other historical relig. ions, Christianity is not a system of rigid precepts by which conduct can be infallibly guided, but a spirit, a principle, an inward law, aspiring to purify and regulate the temper, the motives, and the aims, while it leaves their practical developments to be fashioned by the individual judgment, after consideration of the circumstances to be dealt with in each particular case. And since, in the course of ages and the vicissi

The Life and Writings of Charles

By the

Leslie, M. A., Nonjuring Divine.
Rev. R. J. Eeslie. London, 1885.
William Law, Nonjuror and Mystic.
By the Rev. J. H. Overton. London, 1881.

tudes of the social order, the circumstances may vary almost without limit, the habits and lines of conduct which at one time are the most in accordance with the Christian spirits, and rightly approve themselves to the conscience, may at another epoch wear the very opposite aspect and frustrate the ends which Christianity is intended to promote. In scarcely any case, outside the fundamental rules of morality, can such precepts and examples as the sacred books of our religion contain be taken literally for an authoritative guide of conduct under all circumstances, without risk of falling into some grievous blunder. The more resolute we are to act in their spirit, the more bound we are to hold ourselves free from being coerced by their outward form and bare letter. But this distinction between the spirit and the letter, between the immutable principle and the changeable expression of it in action and conduct, is just that which is most difficult to be drawn with precision and confidence. The unenlightened fail to understand it, the scrupulous stumble at it, the self-seeking abuse it. Hence has sprung a plentiful crop of controversies, divisions, of fences against religion and society, by which the ecclesiastical and civil orders have been disturbed, to the great detriment both of Church and State.

These reflections are suggested to us by the biographical works named above, which have recently revived attention to the almost forgotten sect of the Nonjurors. To every by ecclesiastical prejudices it must, one whose judgment is not warped we think, by this time be tolerably clear that the schism, originated at