_Lastly_, your duty to your own bodies: to preserve them; to make, or rather let--for they are made so to go--their wheels go sweetly; to keep the _girs_ firm round the old barrel; neither to over nor under work our bodies, and to listen to their teaching and their requests, their cries of pain and sorrow; and to keep them as well as your souls unspotted from the world. If you want to know a good book on Physiology, or the Laws of Health and of Life, get Dr. Combe's _Physiology_; and let all you mothers get his delightful _Management of Infancy_. You will love him for his motherly words. You will almost think he might have worn petticoats,--for tenderness he might; but in mind and will and eye he was every inch a man. It is now long since he wrote, but I have seen nothing so good since; he is so intelligent, so reverent, so full of the solemnity, the sacredness, the beauty, and joy of life, and its work; so full of sympathy for suffering, himself not ignorant of such evil,--for the latter half of his life was a daily, hourly struggle with death, fighting the destroyer from within with the weapons of life, his brain and his conscience. It is very little physiology that you require, so that it is physiology, and is suitable for your need. I can't say I like our common people, or indeed, what we call our ladies and gentlemen, poking curiously into all the ins and outs of our bodies as a general accomplishment, and something to talk of. No, I don't like it. I would rather they chose some other _ology_. But let them get enough to give them awe and love, light and help, guidance and foresight. These, with good sense and good senses, humility, and a thought of a hereafter in this world as well as in the next, will make us as able to doctor ourselves--especially to act in the _preventive service_, which is your main region of power for good--as in this mortal world we have any reason to expect. And let us keep our hearts young, and they will keep our legs and our arms the same. For we know now that hearts are kept going by having strong, pure, lively blood; if bad blood goes into the heart, it gets angry, and shows this by beating at our breasts, and frightening us; and sometimes it dies of sheer anger and disgust, if its blood is poor or poisoned, thin and white. "He may dee, but he'll never grow auld," said a canty old wife of her old minister, whose cheek was ruddy like an apple.