PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY JOHN MURPHY. PHILADELPHIA: JAMES FULLERTON, PITTSBURG: GEORGE QUIGLEY. SOLD BY ALL THE PRINCIPAL BOOKSELLERS. 1848. HD82417 HARVAR COLLECT LIBRARY SHELDON FUND INLY 10. 1940 ENTERED, according to the Act of Congress, in the year eighteen hundred and forty-seven, by JOHN MURPHY, in the clerk's office of the District Court of Maryland. JOHN MURPHY, TYPOGRAPHER, 178 Market street, Baltimore. Stereotyped by Wм. H. HOPE. PREFACE. HESE lectures were intended as, in some measure, a counterpart to the course I gave the winter before the last to Young Men. It may naturally be asked why they were not all confined, as those Lectures were, to one class? The audience in the first case was unmixed, but in the second composed of both sexes; and although it was my intention to devote a greater part of the course to the Sphere and Duties of Woman, I thought it equitable to select such subjects for a part of it as would be equally interesting to all. I chose therefore for the last three lectures topics of a literary and philosophical cast, in which every mind has an equal interest, and which I supposed best calculated to improve the taste and cultivate the intellect. My only regret, on looking over these sheets, is to perceive how imperfectly my limits have permitted me to present some of the most important views. There is scarcely a topic I have treated, which might not be expanded into a volume. The exhaustless resources which are opening upon society in public lectures, is a subject which is worthy of a more minute and extended development. This system is destined, I have not the least doubt, to work great changes in society. It will demonstrate what with me has ever been a favorite theory, the compatibility of daily toil with intellectual cultivation. Since writing these lectures I have seen a publication called the "Lowell Offering," composed entirely by the factory girls, which amply corroborates all I have ever thought or said upon this subject. No man can read that periodical, and say that daily labor has any tendency to degrade or enfeeble the mind, to debase or chill the heart. There are some topics which I was obliged altogether to omit, the physical education of woman, and her political rights. The first of these may be said to belong more especially to the physi |