r. Windship holding it in high esteem, as occupying the mind while
employing every part of the body, harmonizing the muscular system,
giving quickness to eye and hand, and improving the balancing power.
The English, who systematize all amusements so much more than we, have
developed this simple entertainment into several different games,
arduous and complicated as their games of ball. The mere multiplication
of the missiles also lends an additional stimulus, and the statistics
of success in this way appear almost fabulous. A zealous English
battledoorean informs me that the highest scores yet recorded in the
game are as follows: five thousand strokes for a single shuttlecock,
five hundred when employing two, one hundred and fifty with three, and
fifty-two when four airy messengers are kept flying simultaneously.

It may seem trivial to urge upon rational beings the use of a
shuttlecock as a duty; but this is surely better than that one's health
should become a thing as perishable, and fly away as easily. There is
no danger that our educational systems will soon grow too careless of
intellect and too careful of health. Reforms, whether in physiology or
in smaller things, move slowly, when prejudice or habit bars the way.
Paris is the head-quarters of medical science; yet in Paris, to this
day, the poor babies in the great hospital of La Maternite are so
tortured in tight swathings that not a limb can move. Progress is not
in proportion to the amount of scientific knowledge on deposit in any
country, but to the extent of its diffusion. No nation in the world
grapples with its own evils so promptly as ours. It is but a few years
since there was a general croaking about the physical deterioration of
young men in our cities,--and now already the cities and the colleges
are beginning to lead the rural districts in this respect. The guaranty
of reform in American female health is to be found in the growing
popular conviction that reform is needed. The community is tired of
the reproaches of foreigners, and of the more serious evils of homes
desolated by disease, and lives turned to tragedies. Morbid anatomy has
long enough served as a type of feminine loveliness; our polite society
has long enough been a series of soirees of incurables. Health is coming
into fashion. A mercantile parent lately told me that already in his
town, if a girl could vault a five-barred gate, her prospects for a
husband were considered to be improved t