regarded as the chief instrument of sexual allurement which the armory of costume supplies to a woman, for it furnishes her with a method of heightening at once her two chief sexual secondary characters, the bosom above, the hips and buttocks below. We cannot be surprised that all the scientific evidence in the world of the evil of the corset is powerless not merely to cause its abolition, but even to secure the general adoption of its comparatively harmless modifications. Several books have been written on the history of the corset. Léoty (_Le Corset à travers les Ages_, 1893) accepts Bouvier's division of the phases through which the corset has passed: (1) the bands, or fasciæ, of Greek and Roman ladies; (2) period of transition during greater part of middle ages, classic traditions still subsisting; (3) end of middle ages and beginning of Renaissance, when tight bodices were worn; (4) the period of whalebone bodices, from middle of sixteenth to end of eighteenth centuries; (5) the period of the modern corset. We hear of embroidered girdles in Homer. Even in Rome, however, the fasciæ were not in general use, and were chiefly employed either to support the breasts or to compress their excessive development, and then called _mamillare_. The _zona_ was a girdle, worn usually round the hips, especially by young girls. The modern corset is a combination of the _fascia_ and the _zona_. It was at the end of the fourteenth century that Isabeau of Bavaria introduced the custom of showing the breasts uncovered, and the word "corset" was then used for the first time. Stratz, in his _Frauenkleidung_ (pp. 366 et seq.), and in his _Schönheit des Weiblichen Körpers_, Chapters VIII, X, and XVI, also deals with the corset, and illustrates the results of compression on the body. For a summary of the evidence concerning the difference of respiration in man and woman, its causes and results, see Havelock Ellis, _Man and Woman_, fourth edition, 1904, pp. 228-244. With reference to the probable influence of the corset and unsuitable clothing generally during early life in impeding the development of the mammary glands, causing inability to suckle properly, and thus increasing infant mortality, see especially a paper by Professor Bollinger (_Correspondenz-blatt Deutsch. Gesell. Anthropologie_, October, 1899). The compression caused by the corset, it must be added, is not usually realized or known by those who wear it. Thus, Rushton Parker and Hugh Smith found, in two independent series of measurements, that the waist measurement was, on the average, two inches less over the corset than round the naked waist; "the great majority seemed quite unaware of the fact." In one case the difference was as much as five inches. (_British Medical Journal_, September 15 and 22, 1900.)