fish is, considered preferable; salmon, eels, and divers other sorts, are very indigestible. Salt and dried fish is much used in cold climates, but causes eruptions and herpes, and is not wholesome food during growth.

Water is the most common, and most healthy beverage, when it is of a wholesome nature. Spring water is preferable to any other; and water that has run over beds of rock or sand, is generally good; water in which soap does not dissolve, and which is unfit for cooking, should not be used to drink. When water is not very pure, a little bread, well toasted, and left to steep, will render it more agreeable to the palate, and more wholesome. Water may also be boiled, and left to cool before it is used; but, it is then deprived of air, which is a disadvantage.

Plato advised, that no persons should taste wine till they had reached eighteen years of age. In public schools, if the water be not good, a small portion of wine is mixed with it, which annuls the bad effects that might result from taking it pure. Some weakly constituted children require slight tonics, to facilitate the digestion; a small quantity of beer is often found of great service for weak and scrofulous children. Cider gives worms; the more simple the beverage, the more it conduces to health. Beer, which is only good when fresh, and unmixed with the juice of narcotic plants, wine and water, or pure water, are by far the most wholesome beverage.

There is a very common prejudice existing, both in England and France, which it should be our earnest endeavour to remove. Young people, forming the standard for beauty from their own fancy, and not according to real good taste, have a great dread of becoming too stout, and considering elegance consists in being thin, endeavour, by all possible means, to attain the desired end, and injure their health, by continually drinking vinegar; nothing can possibly prove more detrimental to the constitution, and to good looks. A lady, without being stout, may be handsome; but a very thin person, appearing fit for an anatomical study, can have no pretensions to beauty.

It was not thus the Greeks understood beauty; it is not with skinny necks, and a frame scarcely covered with flesh, that the lovely women of Circassia, Italy, France, and England, serve as models for painters and statuaries, and rival the splendid remains of antiquity.

If a young girl be naturally inclined to an excess of enborpoint, the appetite should be moderated, and regular exercise taken. We here give the real secret for preventing lustiness, and the remedy is not only free from danger, but conducive to health; while acidulated beverage is detrimental both to health and beauty.

When the adipose tissue is diminished and deteriorated by these artificial means, which in reality constitutes disease, the bones grow longer,

the chest narrower, and a rapid consumption sometimes takes place.

Thus, regularity is necessary to the perfection of growth, and may greatly contribute to the cure of any practical deviation arising from too precocious development. To be careful in the choice of food, and adapt it to the different age and different state of children's health, should be the invariable study of good mothers, and enlightened governesses.

But if the human body may be compared to numerous cells destined for the reception of divers materials, and that different species of food powerfully modifies the constitution; if some aliments are nourishing, others deleterious; if each substance furnishes its own peculiar property, and modifies our feelings; if the inhabitants of the South of France are more lively than those of the North; this fact once established, nutrition may then be adapted to each individual, and employed adjunctive to other means, in the correction of constitutional defects, as well as corporal deviation.

In terminating this chapter, there is a point on which we feel the propriety of insisting, -temperance in early life: modified, according to the climate, and the habits of the people, it is every where, the tenure on which man holds his health. With temperance, says an English traveller, we may traverse the frozen

mountains of polar ice, or bask in the warm vallies which lie along the sun's path. We may bear vicissitudes of heat and cold, and cross and recross the equator. In voyages and travels, we cannot always eat of our accustomed diet, nor dine at our usual hours; but we may contrive to observe the laws of temperance. It was this idea of the troubles and irregularity of life, which led Locke to assert, that it was not necessary to observe a regular diet; this, however, was a false idea, not at all adaptable for rearing young children

The stomach is one of the first organs claiming physical education; if we eat when we are not hungry; if we take substance not adapted to the wants of the stomach, indigestion is the natural consequence; and the food remaining in the sac of the stomach, nearly in the state in which it was swallowed, occasions uncomfortable sensations, and after a time passes in a crude or undigested state into the intestines, in which it frequently occasions colic, and other painful sensations, and by sympathy, pain in the head and other parts of the body.

CHAP. XIII.

On Exercise.

WHAT power can the body attain if be not exercised? Were we to keep the suckling twenty years in swaddling clothes, we should have a helpless monster; a babe of twenty, that could neither walk nor stand, merely from want of exercise.

The ancients were so fully aware of the importance of exercise, that they considered it one of the first requisites in education. Legislators and philosophers pointed out the advantages of exercise, and not satisfied with applying it to the development of the organs, had also recourse to it as a therapeutic agent.

Life could not be maintained in organs remaining in perfect repose; all is agitation, all is movement in organized bodies; and both internal and external motion are symptoms of life. Plants though fixed to the soil, are shaken by the winds, and this agitation is eminently useful to their development.

Besides internal movements, not in abeyance to the will, and which cause the heart to beat, the lungs to expand, and the stomach to digest, man is subject to involuntary internal movements, which give a new impulsion to the frame. If man does not take exercise, his functions soon