lately the architect and builder have pitchforked into street and square with facile and contented wisdom of wigwam descent. She would require here, like Madam Ischomachus, to grasp all the details, with as much precision as the old Phoenician merchant, or as the modern yachtsman, who knows the details of his immaculate craft so well, that even in storm, hurricane, or fire, all his resources are ready at hand. She would require in these days to know this and something more. She would have to learn how the immaculate house is provided in every room with at least moderate ventilation. She would proceed to find out how, most effectively and economically, she can maintain in the varying seasons an even and equable temperature. She would aim to consider in what way she could keep the air of the house free of that most objectionable of mischiefs, dust. She would demand to have marked for her on a map or plan the precise position of every drain-pipe in the establishment, and would insist, with intelligent skill, on having every drain kept as systematically clean as the china in the housemaid's cupboard, or the metal covers that make so many bright and effective objects over the dresser of the well-arranged kitchen. She would see, not trusting to the mere word of anyone, that those drains were properly ventilated, so that sewer air could never enter the domain except as a burglar might enter by special skill and violence, against which there is no absolute protection. She would learn enough of the chemistry of water to enable her to determine with as much facility as she could tell when a looking-glass is clear enough to reflect back, without fault, the image of her face, whether a water was wholesome and drinkable; and she would acquire a sufficient amount of skill to direct how an impure water might be purified and made safe for her and hers to drink and to use for all domestic requirements. She would see that sunlight found its way as freely as is possible into every apartment. She would see that damp had no place in any apartment. She would insist that where any living thing that ought not to be present in a house exists in it, that house is unclean, and in some way uninhabitable for health; since health will not abide with anything that is uncleanly. She would see to the annual purification of the dwelling as though a Passover were still a universal belief and practice. She would make the very act of cleaning and cleansing clean; she would make the very places for cleaning and cleansing, the scullery, the landing, the bath-room, the laundry, the cynosures of the household.

In the art of perfecting health, the educated woman should bring her best energies to understand the selection, the purification, the preparation, and the administration of foods and drinks. I have shown from striking examples how, by a simple application of knowledge, she might prevent two great national disfigurements and disgraces of ignorance. She might go far beyond that advancement, great as it is. As she would keep seeds of pestilence from

6

her fold, or vulgar poisons that kill outright and which proclaim at once, with loud voice, accident, disease and murder,' so would she do her best to keep out those refined and subtle poisons which, in and under the name of strong drinks, bring silently more accident, more disease, and more murder into this inscrutable world than all the other poisons put together, unlicensed though they be, and so little liked by the exciseman that he would fly them any distance, the de'il himself in company, rather than so much as touch them with his divining rod.

I think, too, that in regard to foods an intelligent study, based on knowledge of the natures and uses of foods, would enable her not merely to carry out the best selections and preparations now known, but would lead her to introduce certain new and much improved methods of feeding. That she would acquire a thorough knowledge of the best art of cookery, I take for granted; that she would acquire a good knowledge in choosing foods in season, I take for granted; that she would become an adept in detecting actual wholesome from actual unwholesome foods, I take for granted; that she would find out what foods are most suitable for persons of different age and constitution, I take for granted; and that she would distribute food with well-balanced hand, neither feeding over-indulgently nor parsimoniously, that also I take for granted. But I expect she would learn to do more than all these things in relation to food, and would help, perhaps lead, in a work of the future that is in the truest sense universal in its objects. She would be able better than anyone to put to the test of experience whether it is good or necessary to go to the living animal creation at all for human food. I do not wish to introduce any false sentiment into this question. It is unnecessary for me to say that every cultivated mind revolts at the sight of the shambles and involuntarily shudders when the veil is lifted which conceals the processes through which the animalised meal passes before it reaches the table. More to the point is it for me to wish to know whether it is philosophical, that is to say, truly physiological, to go to the inert and dead to get the best sustainment for the quick and the living. I am in doubt. It does not seem to me that man is constructed to be a carnivorous animal. It does not seem clear, putting the anatomical argument altogether aside, that it can be good to go to the secondary sources of supply for our food when nature bountifully presents them to us from her prime source. It does not seem reasonable that we should employ millions of living laboratories for our daily food, and take the risks of disease which they in endless forms produce and propagate for us, when we can get all that is necessary without the chance of such production and of such propagation. It does not seem certain, when we know that the vegetable world is the original source of every particle of living food and that carnivorous animals have to depend on the herbivorous for their supplies, so that carnivorous feeding is an anomalous rather than a basic principle of nature, it does not, I

repeat, knowing these things, seem certain that the cost of the support of the living laboratories is justifiable on any ground except the extravagant process of making work that work may be at hand and employment procurable. In old and barbarous times, when implements were few and animals were plentiful, it is easy to see why men should feed by hunting and by slaying; and it is also easy to understand why in a becalmed sea a vigilant captain should set his restless crew to the useless employment of polishing an anchor. It is not so easy to see why in this day, when the great question of peace is food, cheap food, good food, healthy food, and when means for endless, refined and ennobling employments are open, we should maintain the practices of a barbaric era. Still it must be confessed to be a point for doubt whether the secondary supplies of food for man, derived from the animal world, are or are not necessary, and that doubt it is in the rôle of the educated woman to solve. Her discernment, properly and eagerly directed, would soon settle whether those about her were injured or benefited by an exclusive vegetable and fruit diet. The very timorousness which Xenophon describes would make her studies the more watchful and her experiences the more definite.

However she might solve this grand enigma, sure I am that in watching carefully over food and feeding the educated woman would quickly discover a world of facts that would be of unspeakable value. It has been one of the endeavours of my life to show that we living men and women make, in our own corporeal structures, a refined atmosphere, which I have called a nervous atmosphere, or ether: an atmosphere which present in due tension distinguishes life: which absorbed or condensed distinguishes death: an atmosphere through which the external world vibrates and pierces us to the soul: an atmosphere which, pure and clear, brings us peace and power, and judgment and joy: an atmosphere which, impure and clouded, brings us unrest, and weakness, and instability, and misery. A physical atmosphere, lying intermediate to the physical and metaphysical life, and which our great colleague, William Crookes, might call radiant.

That atmosphere, serene or troublous, light or gross, bright or gloomy, we make in ourselves, not from ourselves, but from what we take into ourselves and transmute there. We make it from foods and drinks, and as we make it it makes us. Go into the wards of a lunatic asylum and notice amongst the most troubled sufferers the odour of the gases and the vapours emitted by their skin and their breath. That odour is from their internal atmosphere, their nervous ethereal emanation. They are mad: mad, we say, up to suicide or murder or any criminal folly. Can it be otherwise? They have secreted the cause of the madness; they are filled with it; it exhales from them. Catch it, condense it, imbibe it, and in like manner it would madden anyone! In one experiment of mine I have shown that a common product, a food if we like to call it so, a thing that can be made from food stuff, an alcohol, will by its mere artificial temporary diffusion through the healthy body bring on, for the time

it is acting as a false atmosphere, such awful despair that the experimenter can barely avoid destroying his own life.

See then from the study of foods, out of which the radiant or deadly atmosphere is made, what fields of discovery open to the mind. A mother, watching the effect of food on her gloomy saturnine child, may detect how she can so feed it that its cloud shall pass away. Happy mother of a child! Far far happier mother, perchance, of science and hope. In many great establishments for the insane so much gloom is secreted in the nervous recesses of human frames that several times a day, but for excessive vigilance, some terrible hand would raise itself against itself, to kill itself. What if in a wiser day, however far off, the removal of that little cloud from a troubled child should show the way to the removal of those denser, blacker clouds which lower and create storms in human breasts, overpowering altogether the radiant nervous ether! What if from that minor event this greater one should follow! What nobler accomplishment of noble deed could woman perform, save and except when she is the mother of her kind?

Referring back to our friend Ischomachus, and Madam his lady, I said he would probably not wish that she, like Hippocrates, should be learned in diagnosis. Neither in the present day should I press that as a part of the education of woman as a sanitary scholar. I do not say this as if to frighten anyone away from an art too obscure to be thought of, for diagnosis is one of the easiest and most commonplace of human acquirements when the superstitious mystery that is made to surround it is cleared away. But I say it for the reason that the art is not necessary for women except in a limited degree. I would claim, however, that to this extent it should be cultivated by women. They should know the correct names and characters of the more common diseases, and they should know, by sight, the everyday contagious or communicable diseases. To this knowledge of the communicable affections they should add a few facts bearing upon the periods of incubation, the periods, that is to say, between the time when these diseases are what is vulgarly called 'caught' and the time when they are developed and in turn communicable, or again, to use a common term, 'catchable.' Thus, to know that scarlet fever may be incubated in a few hours, while smallpox takes twelve days, measles twelve to fourteen days, and so on, is very useful knowledge. It enables the question of the isolation of the unaffected or the removal of the sick to be rationally considered; it suggests inquiry as to the origin of the infection or contagion; and it gives reliance to those who are attending to the wants of the affected. In like manner it is well for women to know the critical periods, special dangers, and ordinary modes of termination of diseases. Beyond this their diagnostic skill need not go.

At the same time all the best known methods of preventing

disease should be diligently acquired, and the management of the sick room should be systematically learned. The woman should know everything about registering the temperature of the sick room and the degree of humidity; the mode of ventilation; the different special methods of feeding, washing, and changing the sick; and the most efficient means of disinfecting, and of removing or destroying the poisons of the communicable diseases. How, in this way, the woman could help the physician, none but the physician can understand. I have said many times, and, on the principle that

room,

Truth can never be confirmed enough,

Though doubt should ever sleep

I declare it again, that if, in the management and treatment of any of the acute and of many of the chronic diseases, there was given me, in this climate, absolute control of the fire and the window of the sick I could determine the course of the illness. As many as pleased of my learned brethren might come and go, and consult and prescribe; let me have exclusive right to those two influences, the fire and the window, and the fate of the sick man would be in my hands, the best other efforts all but void and vain. How vital, therefore, the position of the woman, educated to sanitary work, in the sick room! What an aid to the physician! And not to the sick alone should this systematic care of the woman be directed. It should extend, more carefully than it has ever yet done, to the very young; to those who are in the first weeks and months of life, so that they be saved pains and impressions, which received and registered, if not remembered, may be penalties of after days. I conceive, in fact, there is no department of practice more neglected, in respect to principles, than the management of offspring in earliest youth. Love there is plenty of; admiration unbounded; rational systematic training the poorest that can be described.

Let me be content to point out but one more lesson for the modern edition of Madam the wife of Ischomachus. She should have, in addition to instruction on the points above named, a good training also on certain subjects which refer to mental as well as physical education, and to qualities which lie somewhat out of the way of what is purely physical, and which yet obscurely lean towards it. In these directions she should understand the little appreciated study of temperaments, the nervous, the bilious, the sanguine, and the lymphatic. She should study the combinations of these, and she should observe how temperament influences health, taste, activity and disease. From this she would learn how different natures would intermix in work or play, and what work, what play would suit the nature. The sanguine child, ruddy and ready, with blue eyes, red hair, strong muscle, quick movement, restless limb, she may set to study at books while she curbs exercise, with no fear that books will kill, for that child will outlive any book. The bilious