Take the man, for instance, who wants to walk a race of several miles, or to run or row one. He has often heard of men getting their weight down to a certain figure for a similar purpose. He has seen some one who did it, and he is confident that he can do it. He sets about it, takes much and severe physical work daily, warmly clad, perspiring freely, while he subjects his skin to much friction from coarse towels. He does without certain food which he understands makes fat, and only eats that which he believes makes mainly bone and muscle. He sticks to his work, and gradually makes that work harder and faster. To his gratification, he finds that not only has his wind improved, so that, in the place of the old panting after a slight effort--walking briskly up an ordinary flight of stairs, for instance--he can now breathe as easily and quietly, and can stick to it as long, as any of his leaner companions. By race-day he is down ten, fifteen, or twenty pounds, or even more, as the case may be. While he has thus reduced himself, and is far stronger and more enduring than he was before, he is not the only one who has lost flesh, if there have been a number working with him, as in a boat-crew. Notice the lists of our university crews and their weights, published when they commence strict training, say a month before the race, and compare them with those of the same men on race-day, particularly in hot weather. The reduction is very marked all through the crew. In the English university eights it is even more striking, the large and stalwart fellows, who fill their thwarts, often coming down in a month an average of over a dozen pounds per man. We have seen a student, after weighing himself on scales in the gymnasium, sit down at a fifty-five pound rowing weight, pull forty-five full strokes a minute for twenty minutes, then, clad exactly as before, weigh again on the same scales, and find he was just one pound lighter than he was twenty minutes earlier. But the difference is more marked in more matured men, who naturally run to flesh, than in students. A prize-fighter, for instance, in changing from a life of indulgence and immoderate drinking, will often come down as much as thirty, or even forty pounds, in preparing for his contest. It should be remembered that, besides other advantages of his being thin, it is of great importance that his face should be so lean that a blow on his cheek shall not puff it up, and swell it so as to shut up his eye, and put him at his enemy's mercy. But most people do not care to take such severe and arduous work as either the amateur athlete or the prize-fighter. If they could hit on some comparatively light and easy way of restoring themselves physically to a hard-muscle basis, and could so shake off their burden of flesh without interfering seriously with their business, they would be glad to try it. Let us see if this can be done.