added lease of life to her. It is the same with all
branches of Art whose pursuit leads into the open air. Rosa Bonheur,
with her wanderings among mountains and pastures, alternating with the
vigorous work of the studio, needed no other appliances for health. The
same advantages come to many, in spite of delinquent mothers, in
the bracing habits of household labor, at least where mechanical
improvements have not rendered it too easy. Improved cooking-stoves and
Mrs. Cornelius have made the culinary art such a path of roses that
it is hardly now included in early training, but deferred till after
matrimony. Yet bread-making in well-ventilated kitchens and sweeping in
open-windowed rooms are calisthenics so bracing that one grudges them to
the Irish maidens, whose round and comely arms betray so much less need
of their tonic influence than the shrunken muscles exhibited so freely
by our short-sleeved belles.

Perhaps even well-developed arms are not so essential to female beauty
as erectness of figure, a trait on which our low school-desks have made
sad havoc. The only sure panacea for round shoulders in boys appears to
be the military drill, and Miss Mitford records that in her youth it was
the custom in girls' schools to apply the same remedy. Dr. Lewis relies
greatly on the carrying of moderate weights upon a padded wooden cap
which he has devised for this purpose; and certainly the straightest
female figure with which I am acquainted--aged seventy-four--is said to
have been formed by the youthful habit of pacing the floor for half an
hour dally, with a book upon the head, under rigid maternal discipline.
Another traditional method is to insist that the damsel shall sit erect,
without leaning against the chair, for a certain number of hours daily;
and Sir Walter Scott says that his mother, in her eightieth year, took
as much care to avoid giving any support to her back as if she had been
still under the stern eye of Mrs. Ogilvie, her early teacher. Such
simple methods may not be enough to check diseased curvatures or
inequalities when already formed: these are best met by Ling's system
of medical gymnastics, or "movement-cure," as applied by Dr. Lewis, Dr.
Taylor, and others.

The ordinary gymnastic apparatus has also been employed extensively by
women, and that very successfully, wherever the exercises have been
systematically organized, with agreeable classes and competent teachers.
If the gymnasium often fails to