That ill-health is more common amongst American women of the middle and higher classes than amongst the women of other nations is proven by a great many considerations. In the first place, we have the testimony of many eminent physicians on this point. Dr. Austin Flint, Sr., is said to have declared that if things went on as they are now going, in fifty years it would be well-nigh impossible to find a healthy woman of American descent. Numerous articles have appeared in the medical magazines by such writers as Dr. Mary Putnam-Jacobi, Dr. Engelmann, and many others, calling attention to the alarming and increasing prevalence of ill-health among American women. We have in addition the testimony of such close and careful observers as our novelists, Howells and James, which is of even greater value, as coming from laymen, who would naturally not be so quick to notice such things as physicians. Howells speaks of the “typical American girl, never very sick and never very well.” Do we not all know her? And again and again he speaks of her lack of physical development as compared with her European sisters. James, in one of his stories, describes a little girl who comes dashing into the hotel parlor on roller-skates, crying, “Get out of the way.” One can see all too plainly from his description, the typical American little girl, with her weak ankles, her thin, flat chest, her feeble little arms and legs, and her lack of proper parental control. Again, in “_A Bundle of Letters_,” he makes one of his male heroines say: “The types here, excepting myself, are exclusively feminine. We are thin, my dear Harvard; we are pale, we are sharp. There is something meagre about us; our line is wanting in roundness, our composition in richness. The American temperament is represented by two young girls. These young girls are rather curious types. They are cold, slim, sexless; the physique is not generous, not abundant; it is only the drapery that is abundant.” The bearing of two or three feeble children ought not to make a physical wreck of a woman; but how often do we see this the case? Compare the American mother—with her sick headache, her general physical inefficiency, her everlasting doctors’ and druggists’ bills, and her two or three delicate, bottle-fed children, with the stout, active German or English matron, and her sturdy brood of eight or ten, every one of whom she has nursed at her own breast. Let the reader take his stand at some fashionable street-corner on a sunny afternoon and notice carefully the women who pass by. Below are given two figures after Lauder Brunton. The first represents the posture of health; the second, the posture of physical degeneracy. [Illustration]