Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife | Page 3

yet a Spirit still, and bright With something of angelic light."
It is an obviously true, and therefore a trite observation, that no one, woman or man, should consider that education (using the term broadly) stopped with graduation from school or college. But the statement that a grown person who has not settled down to some particular life work, such as is often the case with a young unmarried woman, should continue at least one serious _study,_ will not be so generally accepted or acceptable. Yet in no other way may that mental discipline be obtained which is necessary to the mature development of character. Neglect to cultivate the ability to go down to the root of a subject, to observe it in its relations, and to apply it practically, will inevitably lead to superficial consideration of every subject, and even ignorance of the fact that this is superficial consideration. As a practical result, the person will drift through life rudderless, the sport of circumstance. She will act by impulse and chance, and be continually at a loss how to correct her errors. The shallowness with which women as a class are charged is due to the fact that, their aim in life for a considerable period not having been fixed by marriage or choice of a profession, they do not substitute some definite interest for such remissness, and so form the habit of intellectual laziness.
The study which an unmarried and unemployed woman should pursue may be anything worthy of thought, but preferably a practical subject at which, if necessary, the woman is ready to earn her living. Many a family has been saved from financial ruin by a daughter studying the business or the profession of the father, and, upon his breakdown from ill-health, becoming his right-hand assistant, or, in the case of his death, even taking his place as the family bread-winner. In these days when farming is becoming more and more a question of the farmer's management, and less and less of his personal manual labor, a daughter in a farmer's family already supplied with one or more housekeepers may, as legitimately as a son, study the science of agriculture, or one of its many branches, such as poultry-raising or dairying, and with as certain a prospect of success. Ample literature of the most practical and authoritative nature on every phase of farming may be secured from the Department of Agriculture at Washington, and the various State universities offer special mid-winter courses in agriculture available for any one with a common-school education, as well as send lecturers to the farmer's institutes throughout the State.
To give examples of women who have made notable successes at farming and its allied industries would be invidious, since there are so many of them.
Studies that look to the possibility of the student becoming a teacher are preeminent in the development of mentality. The science of psychology is the foundation of the art of pedagogy, and every woman, particularly one who may some day be required to teach, should know the operations of the mind, how it receives, retains, and may best apply knowledge. An essential companion of this study is physiology, the science of the nature and functions of the bodily organs, together with its corollary, hygiene, the care of the health. From ancient times psychology and physiology have been considered as equally associated and of prime importance. "A sound mind in a sound body" is an old Latin proverb. The need of every one to "know himself," both in mind and body, was taught by the earliest "Wise Men" of Greece. The Roman emperor Tiberius said that any one who had reached the age of thirty in ignorance of his physical constitution was a fool, a thought that has been modernized, with an unnecessary extension of the age, into the proverb, "At forty a man is either a fool or a physician."
The study of psychology is a basis for every employment or activity which has to deal with enlightenment or persuasion of the public. The person who would like to become a speaker or writer needs to begin with it rather than with the study of elocution or rhetoric. The first thing essential for him to know is himself; the second, his hearers or readers--what is the order of progress in their enlightenment. Even logical development of a subject is subsidiary to the practical psychological order. Formal logic, the analysis of the process of reasoning, is a cultural study rather than a practical one, save in criticism both of one's own work and another's. More cultural, and at the same time more practical, is the study of exact reasoning in the form of some branch of mathematics. Abraham Lincoln, when he "rode the circuit" as a lawyer, carried with him a geometry,