In the following year of 1860 came that ever popular book, _Notes on Nursing: What it Is, and What it is Not_, of which more than one hundred thousand copies have been sold. In it Miss Nightingale gives such homely advice as can be put into practice by every girl and woman in the land. The subject is always topical, and I cannot do better than cull some of the words of wisdom from the Queen of Nurses. The _Notes_, she explains, are not intended as a manual for nurses but simply to give hints for thought to women who have personal charge of the health of others, and almost every woman in England has some time or other the charge of the health of another. “Every woman is a nurse.” Then she proceeds with piquant saying and homely illustration to give simple rules for the amateur nurse. “No need to discuss,” she says, “whether the top of Mont Blanc will ever be inhabited--it will be thousands of years before we have reached the bottom of Mont Blanc in making the earth healthy. Nursing has been limited to signify little more than the administration of medicines and the application of poultices. It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, quiet, and proper selection and administration of diet.” She goes on to refer to the “coxcombries” of education, by which the elements of astronomy are taught to every schoolgirl while the future wives and mothers are not instructed in those laws which God has assigned to the relations of our bodies with the world in which He has put them. It is no use to blame the climate, which we cannot control, for sickness. “What can we do with the east wind?” people ask. “Who is it who knows when the wind is in the east?” returns Miss Nightingale. “Not the Highland drover, certainly exposed to the east wind, but the young lady who is worn out with the want of exposure to fresh air, to sunlight. Put the latter under as good sanitary condition as the former, and she too will not know when the wind is in the east.” Miss Nightingale groups young ladies and soldiers together as the most frequent victims of consumption, owing to foul air and exposure to chills. “Young ladies, like soldiers, go out in all weathers, the one to parties, the other to sentry duty; both enter foul air, the one in ball-rooms, the other in guard-rooms; both go home in damp night air after skin and lungs are oppressed in their functions by overcrowding.” She implores young ladies to open their windows and bedcurtains at night, and not be afraid of spoiling their complexions. This was written, it must be remembered, more than forty years ago, when girls were more afraid of fresh air than they are to-day, now that cycling, hockey, and golf have inured them even to east winds.