cause or no cause, cease to exercise after marriage the attractions which have conducted them to the altar, they cannot in concert meet the trials inseparable from the struggle for existence.

It follows that, whether relatively faulty or not, if women especially, who by instinct, training, and formal profession of their recognition of the elements in which their influence resides, neglect in any way the habitual care of their persons, whether as to cleanliness of skin, neatness of dress, or adornment, they deliberately relinquish their power over men, no matter what the social relations may be between them, for by that act they neglect one of the chief sources of their power, and begin to descend the steps of their throne. Woman herself it was, who, conjointly with man, defined the terms upon which she should share his destiny. A consenting party to the act defining her status, by which she has become all that she now is, she cannot maintain it if neglectful of clearly defined obligations to her willing subjects. A part of her mission on earth is not necessarily to be beautiful, for nature has the final word to say as to that, but to be as attractive as nature will permit. The worldly wisdom of the unscrupulous class, to which we alluded not long since, smiles contemptuously at the frequent blindness of good women to the silken strand by which the liking and affection of some men may be securely held.

One may be very certain, we repeat, that with the multitude, the comfort and pleasure of the bath are the chief incentives, the world over, to the practice' of bathing. Therefore it is that it is so desirable to inculcate the practice in early youth, that it may become the habit of life. Given the heat of summer, the suffering that always and the sleeplessness that sometimes ensue, and few there are who do not gladly bathe. In fact, the wish to bathe, under these circumstances, is truly instinctive. But we looking at the matter as a physician, know that, for

health and beauty, bathing is necessary at all seasons of the year, if practiced according to rules that are perfectly well established, recognizing all conditions present,-temperament, age, state of health, digestion completed, the temperature of the air where the bath is taken, and the temperature of the water.

The promiscuous bathing of the Romans did not take place until the time of the decadence of the empire, and even then did not involve the matrons and daughters of the higher ranks of the people. The change was one of the notes of the depravity of the times, being a new departure in manners involving morals. Not so, however, is it with the Japanese. All travelers are agreed that, with them, up to the very present time, when they are assimilating themselves more and more to European ways, the government discountenancing the continuance of the practice of the promiscuous bathing of the sexes, it had no relation whatever to morals. Even so late an observer as Mr. La Farge, the artist, indicates this in one of his articles on Japan, where he, incidentally to describing his arrival at the town of Utsun oniya, and taking a refreshing bath after a hot day's journey, says that he saw "a whole family, father, mother, children, file down to the big bath-room at the corner, whose windows were open to mine. I heard them romp and splash, and saw their naked arms shining through the steam. Meditating upon the differences which make propriety in different places, I joined my friends at dinner and listened to what the doctor had to say upon the Japanese indifference to nudity; how Japanese morals are not affected by the simplicity of their costume. Then came the question whether this be a reminiscence of Polynesian ancestry and simplicity, or born of climate and cleanliAnd, indeed, all Japan spends most of its time washing, so that the very runners bathe more times a day than our fine ladies." By day-dawn Mr. La Farge was awakened by the various noises of the courtyard, in front of his window. "Our

ness.

Japanese family," he says, "I could hear at their ablutions." And in the course of the day's journey toward the mountains he saw Japanese runners washing by pouring pailfuls of water over each other.

So it is in Japan; bathe, bathe, wash, wash, all the time, from morning until night. No one who has ever witnessed it ever thinks the various processes anything but beneficial to the skin. The scarf-skin, being albuminous, is slightly thinned by the use upon it of water and the alkali which goes to the formation of soap. Even by friction with water alone, it becomes more and more constantly renewed by the layers beneath it. It becomes, by combined ablution and friction, soft, pliant, and finer than satin in the appearance of its texture. Besides this, bathing has upon the corium, or true skin, a revitalizing influence, and thence upon the general system, and thence, by reaction, upon itself. Combined with the proper kinds of soaps, avoiding the irritating ones, bathing removes from the skin all effete oily products, scarf-skin scales, crusts, and everything that may impede the performance of its natural functions, or afford a lodgment to disease.

To give the reader an idea of how far below the civilization of the Japanese many Americans are in these matters, we will take no extreme case by way of illustration, but that of a very respectable man in a distant State, who once freely expressed to us his views on the subject, without the slightest suspicion of how wofully ignorant he was about it. He decided that it is wrong to bathe a baby every day, lest something may be removed that nature had intended for the protection of the skin. That was the way in which he expressed his objection. We gathered from his reply to our question as to what was the nature of the substance to which he alluded, that he meant the oil of the skin. Here was a case where knowledge and ignorance were so comfortably wedded, and reliant upon the opinions of preceding

generations, as to make it impossible to shake the conviction; so we did not attempt the impossible.

It is true, as we have already shown in the chapter on the skin as an organ of the body, that nature secretes and excretes oil for the protection of the skin, even to the point of meeting emergencies, as we had occasion to indicate in the same connection. It is also true that we can use such caustic soaps, or excess of borax, as to remove the oil in quantities so great as to be detrimental to the healthiness of the skin. But there the halftruth which the objector urged ends with the unwisdom of his conclusion. The body may be bathed daily, with the use of the more delicate soaps, with no undue removal of the oil of the skin, and with perfect maintenance of its fine condition. Nature does not cease to yield its store of lubricating material because the scarf-skin is kept cleansed. But the oil, which, having performed its purpose, remains on the surface of the skin in a degraded form, clogging the pores and preventing the freest issue of the effete products of the body, requires the combined detersive influence of pure water and good soap for its removal, and should have them. From its pure source of supply wells up, as nature requires it, whatever the skin in health demands for its best condition. Can any one imagine, and yet this objector must have done so, that any skin can be fragrant if the oily product of the sebaceous glands be retained upon it? Much more probable is it, however, that he had never seen a thoroughly well-conditioned baby, or, if he had, that his sensibility was not acute enough to detect the difference between it and one of the kind to which he had been accustomed. It is the very best practice, adopting the precautions of a warm room and tepid water, a short immersion, a brisk towelling, and quick dressing, to bathe an infant every morning of its life, when it is well, just before it takes its second meal of milk or other food for the day. Only upon these terms can it be perfectly healthy and sweet in

person, and it will be, if healthy, fragrant as a rose. If, as is true, this delicate creature is by constant bathing benefited, its vitality increased, its greatest immunity from disease secured, the process is one which cannot harm, but must improve the physical condition of any grosser being. And so we find, where there is knowledge of its efficacy, the process applied equally to relieving a lowered tone of the system, and to the increase . and maintenance of great vitality and strength.