called a woman's botany, constructed on lines different from any of the text-
books I have glanced at. Here much knowledge interesting in itself can be early
taught, which will spring up into a world of serviceable insights as adolescence
develops and the great law of sex unfolds.
Zoology should always be taught with plenty of pets, menagerie resources, and
with aquaria, aviaries, apiaries, formicaries, etc., as adjuncts. It should start in
the environment like everything else. Bird and animal lore, books, and pictures
should abound in the early stages, and the very prolific chapter of instincts
should have ample illustration, while the morphological nomenclature and
details of structure should be less essential. Woman has domesticated nearly all
the animals, and is so superior to man in insight into their modes of life and
psychoses that many of them are almost exemplifications of moral qualities to
her even more than to man. The peacock is an embodied expression of pride; the
pig, of filth; the fox, of cunning; the serpent, of subtle danger; the eagle, of
sublimity; the goose, of stupidity; and so on through all the range of human
qualities, as we have seen. At bottom, however, the study of animal life is
coming to be more and more a problem of heredity, and its problems should
have dominant position and to them the other matter should grade up.
This shades over into and prepares for the study of the primitive man and child
so closely related to each other. The myth, custom, belief, domestic practises of
savages, vegetative and animal traits in infancy and childhood, the development
of which is a priceless boon for the higher education of women, open of
themselves a great field of human interest where she needs to know the great
results, the striking details, the salient illustrations, the basal principles rather
than to be entangled in the details of anthropometry, craniometry, philology, etc.
All this lays the basis for a larger study of modern man—history, with the
biographical element very prominent throughout, with plenty of stories of heroes
of virtue, acts of valor, tales of saintly lives and the personal element more
prominent, and specialization in the study of dynasties, wars, authorities, and
controversies relegated to a very subordinate place. Sociology, undeveloped,
rudimentary, and in some places suspected as it is, should have in the curriculum
of her higher education a place above political economy. The stories of the great
reforms, and accounts of the constitution of society, of the home, church, state,
and school, and philanthropies and ideals, should to the fore.
Art in all its forms should be opened at least in a propædeutic way and