out-door sports of her brothers. There is a resolute shutting out of every thing like a noisy romp; the active games and all happy, boisterous plays, by field or roadside, are not proper to her! She is cased in a cramping dress, so heavy and inconvenient that no boy could wear it for a day without falling into gloomy views of life. All this martyrdom to propriety and fashion tells upon strength and symmetry, and the girl reaches womanhood a wreck. That she reaches it at all, under these suffering and bleached-out conditions, is due to her superior elasticity to resist a method of education which would have killed off all the boys years before. . . . There are abundant statistics to prove that hard study is the discipline and tonic most girls need to supplant the too great sentimentality and useless day-dreams fostered by fashionable idleness, and provocative of 'nerves,' melancholy, and inanition generally, and, so far as statistics can, that the women-graduates of these colleges make as healthy and happy wives and mothers as though they had never solved a mathematical problem, nor translated Aristotle."—Fortnightly Review.
| NOSTALGIA. |
By FERNAND PAPILLON.
TRANSLATED By A. R. MACDONOUGH.
THOSE great changes of place, temporarily, by masses of people, which were brought about by the late war, have drawn the attention of physicians again to a very singular malady, nostalgia, or homesickness, some extremely noteworthy cases of which appeared, particularly among the mobiles collected at Paris during the siege. Indeed, homesickness is a real disease, occasioning a group of symptoms and disturbances of very definite character—a disease the more real, inasmuch as it often ends in death. An eminent physician, who had earlier opportunities as a health-officer in the navy, and lately again as chief of one of the great Paris ambulances, to study nostalgia very closely, Dr. Benoist de la Grandière, has published an essay on the subject which will give us some interesting facts.
Sauvage describes nostalgia by four words—morositas, pervigilio, anorexia, asthenia—which signify sadness, sleeplessness, want of appetite, and exhaustion. The patient very early loses his cheerfulness and vigor, and courts in solitude a surrender to the fixed idea that haunts him, the thought of his country. He dwells in charmed repetition upon the memories connected with the places where his early life was spent, and paints them with a world of dreams in which his imagination shuts itself so obstinately that nothing can call him away
