The thorax may become accidentally malformed from any violence done to it, particularly during infancy. A frequent source of it is the mode of fashionable dress adopted by females. The corset, to which I allude, when worn only with moderate firmness, and by those not otherwise predisposed to Phthisis, serves but to add elegance and beauty to the female figure; but when applied with the object of converting into a delicate and slender waist, one naturally otherwise, it cannot but do injury. By immoderate pressure, it converts a well formed chest into the deformed and narrow one, or at least an approximation to it, which has just been described. In our own city and time, too many fatal examples of the deleterious effects of this fashion have occurred, to permit us to retain any doubts on the subject. The internal constitution of the body predisposing to Phthisis, independent of external form, has been generally attributed to scrophula. English authors are particularly fond of making Consumption another form of that Protæan disease. We are much disinclined to concur in this opinion from the fact, that the mass of those who labour under the disease in question, and cases too, which, after death show that tuberculated state of the lungs, generally ascribed to scrophula, evince no other of the numerous symptoms of that disorder. The supposition that tubercles were scrophulous, probably originated from the opinion that they are diseased glands; an idea now sufficiently exploded. This hereditary predisposition we know to exist, but of its mode of action we are totally ignorant. In this city there are many melancholy examples of whole families successively falling victims to Consumption, and sufficiently proving its hereditary nature. But an hereditary predisposition does not necessarily produce Consumption. It is not uncommon for parents who inherit this taint, to remain free from disease of the lungs, by the pursuit of laborious occupations. Nor is it more uncommon that the children of these very parents, whose active industry had preserved their lives, and amassed them wealth, should by being enabled to indulge in ease and luxury, fall victims to an inherited Consumption. So the females of a family are sometimes all consumptive, while the males are free from pulmonary disease, in consequence of the more sedentary mode of life of the former. Although no period of life, from infancy to old age, is exempt from Consumption, but all are liable to its attack, yet at a particular age, it is observed to appear more frequently than at any other. This period commences about, or soon after the age of puberty, and terminates at thirty-six; the period at which inflammatory diseases most generally occur.