Why it is, by what strange freak of fashion and blindness to artistic rules, women of the present day think that a deformed and ill-proportioned waist is a requisite of beauty, we do not know. Certainly they never derived such an idea from a contemplation of those monuments of perfect beauty bequeathed to posterity by the chisels of Attic artists, nor from those exquisite figures which lend to the canvas of Titian and Raphael such immortal fame. Look, for instance, at that work of the former artist, now rendered so familiar by the chromo-lithographic process, called 'Titian's Daughter.' It is the portrait of a blonde-haired maiden holding aloft a trencher heaped with fruits. She turns her face to the beholder, leaning slightly backward to keep her equilibrium. Her waist is encircled by a zone of pearls; and it is this waist we would have our readers observe with something more than an æsthetic eye. It is the waist of health as well as beauty. Narrower than either the shoulders or the hips, it is yet anything than that 'wasplike waist,' which is so fashionable a deformity. With such a waist, a woman is fitted to pass through her married state with health and pleasure. There is little fear that she will be the tenant of doctors' chairs, and the victim of drugs and instruments. Let women aim at beauty, let them regard it as a matter of very high importance, worth money and time and trouble, and we will applaud them to the echo. But let them not mistake deformity, vicious shape, unnatural and injurious attitudes, and hurtful distortions for beauty. That not only degrades their physical nature, but it lowers their tastes, and places them in æsthetics on a level with the Indian squaw who flattens her head and bores her nose, and with the Chinese woman who gilds her teeth, and compresses her foot into a shapeless mass. True beauty is ever synonymous with health; and the woman who, out of subservience to the demands of fashion, for years squeezes her waist and flattens her breast, will live to rue it when she becomes a mother. Away, then, with tight corsets and all similar contrivances. Of a similar objectionable character are many of the devices which ignorant men connected with the medical profession urge upon the public for the sake of remedying curvature of the spine, restoring the figure, or supporting the abdomen. Not a few of such braces and supporters are seriously dangerous. A good brace, well-fitting, carefully adjusted, suited to the particular case, is often of excellent service; but the majority of them do not answer this description. Our advice is, that no girl, and still more no mother, should wear one of these without it is fitted upon her by an experienced hand. We have known more than one instance where the binder put on after childbirth has been wrongly placed, and pinned so firmly that it has resulted in producing falling of the womb. This, too, should be sedulously looked after.