And if any one shall answer—­“We do not want robust health so much as intellectual attainment.  The mortal body, being the lower organ, must take its chance, and be even sacrificed, if need be, to the higher organ—­the immortal mind:”—­To such I reply, You cannot do it.  The laws of nature, which are the express will of God, laugh such attempts to scorn.  Every organ of the body is formed out of the blood; and if the blood be vitiated, every organ suffers in proportion to its delicacy; and the brain, being the most delicate and highly specialised of all organs, suffers most of all and soonest of all, as every one knows who has tried to work his brain when his digestion was the least out of order.  Nay, the very morals will suffer.  From ill-filled lungs, which signify ill-repaired blood, arise year by year an amount not merely of disease, but of folly, temper, laziness, intemperance, madness, and, let me tell you fairly, crime—­the sum of which will never be known till that great day when men shall be called to account for all deeds done in the body, whether they be good or evil.

I must refer you on this subject again to Andrew Combe’s ‘Physiology,’ especially chapters iv. and vii.; and also to chapter x. of Madame de Wahl’s excellent book.  I will only say this shortly, that the three most common causes of ill-filled lungs, in children and in young ladies, are stillness, silence, and stays.

First, stillness; a sedentary life, and want of exercise.  A girl is kept for hours sitting on a form writing or reading, to do which she must lean forward; and if her schoolmistress cruelly attempts to make her sit upright, and thereby keep the spine in an attitude for which Nature did not intend it, she is thereby doing her best to bring on that disease, so fearfully common in girls’ schools, lateral curvature of the spine.  But practically the girl will stoop forward.  And what happens?  The lower ribs are pressed into the body, thereby displacing more or less something inside.  The diaphragm in the meantime, which is the very bellows of the lungs, remains loose; the lungs are never properly filled or emptied; and an excess of carbonic acid accumulates at the bottom of them.  What follows?  Frequent sighing to get rid of it; heaviness of head; depression of the whole nervous system under the influence of the poison of the lungs; and when the poor child gets up from her weary work, what is the first thing she probably does?  She lifts up her chest, stretches, yawns, and breathes deeply—­Nature’s voice, Nature’s instinctive cure, which is probably regarded as ungraceful, as what is called “lolling” is.  As if sitting upright was not an attitude in itself essentially ungraceful, and such as no artist would care to draw.  As if “lolling,” which means putting the body in the attitude of the most perfect ease compatible with a fully expanded chest, was not in itself essentially graceful, and to be seen in every reposing figure in Greek bas-reliefs