of a woman's body. Gradually, however, the bodice was
displaced downward, and its effect, ultimately, was to render the breasts
more prominent instead of effacing them. Not only does the corset render
the breasts more prominent; it has the further effect of displacing the
breathing activity of the lungs in an upward direction, the advantage from
the point of sexual allurement thus gained being that additional attention
is drawn to the bosom from the respiratory movement thus imparted to it.
So marked and so constant is this artificial respiratory effect, under the
influence of the waist compression habitual among civilized women, that
until recent years it was commonly supposed that there is a real and
fundamental difference in breathing between men and women, that women's
breathing is thoracic and men's abdominal. It is now known that under
natural and healthy conditions there is no such difference, but that men
and women breathe in a precisely identical manner. The corset may thus be
regarded as the chief instrument of sexual allurement which the armory of
costume supplies to a woman, for it furnishes her with a method of
heightening at once her two chief sexual secondary characters, the bosom
above, the hips and buttocks below. We cannot be surprised that all the
scientific evidence in the world of the evil of the corset is powerless
not merely to cause its abolition, but even to secure the general adoption
of its comparatively harmless modifications.

Several books have been written on the history of the corset.
Leoty (_Le Corset a travers les Ages_, 1893) accepts Bouvier's
division of the phases through which the corset has passed: (1)
the bands, or fasciae, of Greek and Roman ladies; (2) period of
transition during greater part of middle ages, classic traditions
still subsisting; (3) end of middle ages and beginning of
Renaissance, when tight bodices were worn; (4) the period of
whalebone bodices, from middle of sixteenth to end of eighteenth
centuries; (5) the period of the modern corset. We hear of
embroidered girdles in Homer. Even in Rome, however, the fasciae
were not in general use, and were chiefly employed either to
support the breasts or to compress their excessive development,
and then called _mamillare_. The _zona_ was a girdle, worn
usually round the hips, especially by young girls. The modern
corset is a combination of the _fascia_ and the _z