There ought to be in every girls' school in our land, for pupils of every age, a system of physical culture which should first eradicate special weaknesses and defects, and then create and maintain the symmetry of the pupils, increasing their bodily vigor and strength up to maturity. If several, or a majority, of the girls in a class have flat or indifferent chests, put them in a squad which shall pay direct and steady attention to raising, expanding, and strengthening the chest. If many have a bad gait, some stepping too long, others too short, set them aside for daily special attention to their step. If many, or nearly all, have an inerect carriage, wholly lacking _la ligne_ of Dumas, then daily insist on such exercises for them as shall straighten them up and keep them up. The dancing-master teaches the girl to step gracefully and accurately through various dancing-steps. To inculcate a correct length of step, and method of putting the foot down and raising it in walking, is not nearly so difficult a task. If the "setting-up" drill of the West Pointer in a few weeks transforms the raw and ungainly country boy into a youth of erect and military bearing, and insisting on that bearing at all times throughout the first year gives the cadet a set and carriage which he often retains through life, is there anything to hinder the girl from acquiring an equally erect and handsome carriage of the body if she too will only use the means? If the muscles which, when fully developed, enable one to sit or stand erect for hours together are now weak, is it not wise to at once strengthen them? But may not this vigorous muscular exercise, which tends to produce hard and knotted muscles in the man, take away the softer and more graceful lines, which are essentially feminine? If exercise be kept up for hours together, as in the case of the blacksmith, undoubtedly it would. But that is a thing a sensible system of exercise would avoid, as studiously as it would the weakness and inefficiency which result from no work. A little trial soon tells what amount of work, and how much of it, is best adapted to each pupil; then the daily maintaining of that proportion or kind of exercise, and its increase, as the newly-acquired strength justifies and invites it, is all that is required. Without that hardness and solidity which are essentially masculine, there still comes a firmness and plumpness of muscle to which the unused arm or back was a stranger. Instead of these being incompatible with beauty, they are directly accessory to it. "Elegance of form in the human figure," says Emerson, "marks some excellence of structure;" and again, "any real increase of fitness to its end, in any fabric or organism, is an increase of beauty."