Ovid recommends the fair ones of his day to wear those ingenious constructions which give lines to the bust and all it lacks, while Homer describes Juno as wearing a ceinture ornamented with a thousand fringes, and we are, of course, convinced of the fact that she borrowed from Venus a famous cestus wherein were all the pains and penalties of love. The ancient Greeks and Romans sternly opposed the corset, and yet they yielded to the necessity for bands and belts to support the bust, this band being usually made of embroidered leather. There is indisputable proof that in the earliest days of civilisation there was in use a variety of contrivances for the reduction of the feminine figure, and in a most interesting chronicle I read that "Amongst the works of art discovered amongst the ruins of one of the mysterious forest cities in South America is a bas-relief representing a female figure which, in addition to a profusion of massive ornaments, wears a complicated and elaborate waist bandage, which by a system of circular and transverse folding and looping confines the waist just below the ribs to the hips." What could be more conclusive? Here is obviously the ancestress of the straight-fronted _Spécialité_ corset. The origin of the word "stays" comes from stay, to support; the term "corset" may have been developed from "corps": the term "corse," however, must not be confounded with it, and Planché considers this should apply merely to the bodice of a gown. The earliest method of making the stay was with pieces of cane, and this may be compared favourably with a variety obtaining as lately as in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This was made of steel with broad pieces of steel shaped to the hips, and clamped or hinged under each arm, being straightly stiff at the top of the front and the back, where it reached up to the shoulder-blades. These frames, however, were not primarily used to reduce the waist, for they were worn over a corset, so that the dress might yield not to the weakness of a single fold, and that the stomacher might present a front of unruffled smoothness. A development of this stay showed it curved at the top, front, and back, somewhat in the outline of those we wear now, but clamped together down the back, and made of the stiffest of iron, and decorated with countless meaningless-looking little holes and apertures. This was the style adopted by Catherine of Medici, which permitted her the questionable joy of reducing her waist to thirteen inches. Christine of France, we are told by Jacob the bibliophilist, wore a "justaucorps" embroidered in gold and studded with precious stones; this was a remarkable shape, not defining the waist at all, and finished off with an indented basque.