This is worse treatment than that which the ladies received from Hesiod. We have all heard of a young and romantic lady who was so enraptured with the ideal of American Indian life as delineated by Fenimore Cooper, that she fled her home, and went to the savages in Canada. We hope she did not fall to the lot of a Kickapoo. Poor woman! it is pleasanter to believe that she is made from our ribs, which we know come very close to our hearts, and thus to explain the mutual sympathy of man and woman, and thereby to account for that compassion and tenderness man feels for her, and also for the manner in which she flies to man’s side as her true resting-place in peril and doubt. But we have a cosmogony of our own, elucidated from internal convictions, assisted by all the modern appliances of table-rapping and clairvoyancy. According to our cosmogony, woman is compounded of three articles, sugar, tincture of arnica, and soft soap. Sugar, because of the sweetness which is apparent in most women--alas! that in some it should have acidulated into strong domestic vinegar; arnica, because in woman is to be found that quality of healing and soothing after the bruises and wounds which afflict us men in the great battle of life; and soft soap, for reasons too obvious to need specification. “FLAGELLUM SALUTIS” There is a strange old book with the above title to be found in the libraries of the curious, so quaint in character as to deserve to be better known. It was composed by Christian Franz Paullini, a German physician, and was published at Frankfort-on-Maine in 1608. It is a treatise on the advantage of the whip for curative purposes in various disorders. Dr. Paullini, in the first section of his work, directs attention to the consecration of corporal punishment by Scripture and the Church. Did not St. Paul assert, “Castigo corpus meum et in servitutem redigo”? Does not the bishop in confirmation box the ear of the candidate, in token that he is to be ready to endure suffering and shame as a good Christian soldier? And look at the saints of the calendar, were they not mighty in flagellation, fervent in rib-whacking? Shall precious saints and secret ones, Break one another’s outward bones? When savage bears agree with bears, Shall secret ones lug saints by the ears? asks the Puritan in his metrical version of Psalm lxxxiii, and Dr. Paullini promptly answers: “Certainly, it is good for health of soul and body that they should so act towards one another.” Scorpius atque fabæ nostra fuere salus.