How to be Healthy

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HOW TO BE HEALTHY.

HINTS TOWARDS PHYSICAL PERFECTION: OR THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN BEAUTY: showing how to Acquire and Retain Bodily Symmetry. Health, and Vigor; secure Long Life; and avoid the Infirmities and Deformities of Age. By D. H. Jacques. New York; Fowler and Wells, 808 Broadway. Price $1.

This work deserves universal attention, and should awaken everywhere a deeper interest in the physical improvement of the race than has yet been manifested; as it shows how certain and easy this improvement may be made by the use of the perfectly legitimate means therein pointed out. Its revelations of the laws of human configuration, on which symmetry and beauty depend, are both interesting and important as they are novel and surprising; showing, as they do, that the form and features of even the fully mature man or woman (and much more those of the child) may be modified at will, and to an almost unlimited extent—that we have the power to change, gradually but surely, the shape and arrangement of bone, fiber, and fluid, thus growing, day by day, more beautiful or more ugly, according to the direction given to the vital forces. It is deeply interesting to both sexes (but especially to women) and to all ages; and we earnestly commend it to all for whom health, strength, and beauty have any attractions: to parents, as a guide to the right performance of their all important functions and duties, to teachers, who may learn from it how to develop the minds and bodies of their pupils harmoniously together; to young women, who will not look in vain in its pages for the secrets of that womanly beauty and personal attractiveness which they properly desire to possess: and to young men, who will find it a manual of rules for the development of those high qualities of physical vigor and manliness which will command the admiration of their own sex no less the love of the other. Illustrated with twenty plates and a large number of cuts, executed in the highest style of art.

We have only room for two extracts:

BENEFIT OF EXCERCISE

"Exercise is as essential as breathing itself. Without it there can be no healthy and beautiful growth. After a child is a month old it should (the weather permitting) have its daily exercise in the open air. In the house the largest libery consistent with its safety should be allowed. Its clothes must not be tight, its crib narrow, or its perpetual motions in any way restrained. As it grows older it will naturally require still more exercise. It should then be much out of doors, and should play, dance, sing, and shout as nature dictates. Still, quiet, noiseless, "good little children" die young. Give us rather those who are "full of mischief," and "drive around and break things." It is worse than murder to compel children to stay quietly in the house, to say nothing of sending them to school to be shut up six hours a day in an ill ventilated room, and confined to a hard, uncomfortable bench; or of putting a book into their hands at home. We say in all seriousness, with a writer in Blackwood's Magazine, that "a child three years old with a book in its hands is a fearful sight. It is too often the death warrant, such as the condemned criminal stupidity looks at—fatal, yet beyond his comprehension. The child three years of age, or even six, should know little of books, except that they sometimes contain pretty pictures. The distinguished Dr. Spurghelm says: "experiences has demonstrated that of any number of children of equal intellectual power, those who receive no particular care in childhood, and who do not learn to read and write untill the constitution begins to be consolidated, but who enjoy the benefit of a good physical education, very soon surpass in their studies those who commence earlier, and read numerous books when very young."

POSITION DURING SLEEP.

"The position of the body during sleep is worthy of more attention than is generally bestowed upon it. All person in whom there is no malformation, or serious functional derangement, should sleep alternately on the right and left side. Lying on the right side favors digestion, and persons retiring soon after a meal (which should be avoided if possible) will find their comfort and rest promoted by taking that position; but the fact that the lungs on the sides on which one lies are obstructed in their action, complete inflation taking place only on the other side, affords a sufficient reason, were there no other, why a change of position is desirable. Where the hear beats too rapidly, it may be retarded somewhat by lying on the back. This is, therefore, in special cases, a good position; but in general it is to be avoided "Bolsters and high pillows," Dr. Trall remarks, "are among the abominations of fashionable life. The head should never be raised more than a few inches, by a single small pillow. But it is a general custom to pile pillow on pillow, like "alps on alps," until the poor "Doubled and twisted" victim is elevated out of all reasonable shape, and the neck so bent and lungs so compressed that congestion is sure to attack the brain, while free breathing is utterly impossible. "Dullness of mental comprehension, and general torpor or stupidity of the intellectual faculties, are among the consequences of this pernicious habit."