made the physical universe.  Let me, I pray you, appeal to your common sense for a moment.  When any one chooses a horse or a dog, whether for strength, for speed, or for any other useful purpose, the first thing almost to be looked at is the girth round the ribs; the room for heart and lungs.  Exactly in proportion to that will be the animal’s general healthiness, power of endurance, and value in many other ways.  If you will look at eminent lawyers and famous orators, who have attained a healthy old age, you will see that in every case they are men, like the late Lord Palmerston, and others whom I could mention, of remarkable size, not merely in the upper, but in the lower part of the chest; men who had, therefore, a peculiar power of using the diaphragm to fill and to clear the lungs, and therefore to oxygenate the blood of the whole body.  Now, it is just these lower ribs, across which the diaphragm is stretched like the head of a drum, which stays contract to a minimum.  If you advised owners of horses and hounds to put their horses or their hounds into stays, and lace them up tight, in order to increase their beauty, you would receive, I doubt not, a very courteous, but certainly a very decided, refusal to do that which would spoil not merely the animals themselves, but the whole stud or the whole kennel for years to come.  And if you advised an orator to put himself into tight stays, he, no doubt, again would give a courteous answer; but he would reply—­if he was a really educated man—­that to comply with your request would involve his giving up public work, under the probable penalty of being dead within the twelvemonth.

And how much work of every kind, intellectual as well as physical, is spoiled or hindered; how many deaths occur from consumption and other complaints which are the result of this habit of tight lacing, is known partly to the medical men, who lift up their voices in vain, and known fully to Him who will not interfere with the least of His own physical laws to save human beings from the consequences of their own wilful folly.

And now—­to end this lecture with more pleasing thoughts—­What becomes of this breath which passes from your lips?  Is it merely harmful; merely waste?  God forbid!  God has forbidden that anything should be merely harmful or merely waste in this so wise and well-made world.  The carbonic acid which passes from your lips at every breath—­ay, even that which oozes from the volcano crater when the eruption is past—­is a precious boon to thousands of things of which you have daily need.  Indeed there is a sort of hint at physical truth in the old fairy tale of the girl, from whose lips, as she spoke, fell pearls and diamonds; for the carbonic acid of your breath may help hereafter to make the pure carbonate of lime of a pearl, or the still purer carbon of a diamond.  Nay, it may go—­in such a world of transformations do we live—­to make atoms of coal strata, which shall lie buried