=The Stockings.=—Great care must be taken to have the foot of the stockings sufficiently long and loose; this is doubly the case with woolen stockings, which are apt to shrink so much in the wash. A too tight or too short a foot of the stocking interferes with the circulation and causes a cold foot, and when the stocking foot is too short, it produces the same deformities that too short a shoe does. The trouble generally begins in childhood; mothers forget in buying stockings for their children that stockings shrink in the laundry and that children’s feet grow. The result is that the stocking-foot is apt to be too short before it is worn out, and so the toes are bent or cramped together, and there is the starting-point for deformities of the feet as well as corns and bunions. As much harm may come from wearing too short a stocking-foot as too short a shoe. Again, with the present mode of wearing the stocking supporters attached to the corset, or, indeed, one of the functions of the stocking-supporters may be said to be the holding down of the corsets, the supporters are shortened for this purpose, and as a result the entire foot of the stocking is pulled on, and an artificial shortening of the stocking-foot is produced; and this point must be borne in mind in purchasing stockings. Woolen stockings should always be worn during the cold weather. Garters should never be worn around the leg, whether above or below the knees, since, in order to be sufficiently tight to hold the stockings up, they interfere with the circulation by the constriction of the leg, and so cause cold feet and greatly increase the trouble in case of varicose veins. =The Essential Qualities for Winter Underclothing.=—These are that the clothing must be light, loose, warm, and equally distributed over the body. From the hygienic standpoint, the underclothing is the most important part of the dress. We have seen that much of the energy of the body is spent in maintaining its normal temperature, and that the two main functions of the skin are the preservation of the normal body temperature and the excretion of certain effete matters in the form of watery vapors. In the temperate zones two qualities are required of underclothing—that it shall prevent the too rapid radiation of heat from the body and that it shall be absorbent. No material is warm _per se_. The warmth is necessarily derived from the body, so that what is required of the underclothing is that it shall confine the warmth in its meshes; atmospheric air being one of the poorest conductors of heat, the material should be so constructed as to imprison a considerable quantity of air in its meshes.