“Have you a perfectly healthy lady friend? Lay your hand upon her and you will find that her abdomen rises and falls in exactly the same way at every respiratory act; not only so, but that this act is involuntarily performed in a more profound manner every few moments, and that this increased motion operates _particularly_ upon the lowest portion of the trunk. “Observe in the same way your own person. If you are an invalid, you will find this motion diminished, perhaps suppressed. When one half breathes he only half lives.” The lungs or air receptacles are enclosed within the walls of the chest or thoratic cavity; beneath the lungs is the great breathing motor, the diaphragm, of a convex shape when in repose. In all correct inhalation the air filling the lungs flattens the diaphragm. This must result in the expansion of the body adjacent to and surrounding the diaphragm. Natural breathing should be accomplished without any upheaval of the chest or hoisting of the shoulders. That adults, and especially women, have not this deep _waist_ breathing is on account of disuse of the muscles. The young man who is stoop-shouldered, walks the streets with his hands in his pockets or sits bent over his desk, soon diminishes the action of these muscles. The girl, deprived of pockets, may keep her head and shoulders erect, yet by faulty dress, compresses and fixes the lower muscles of respiration and breathes only with the top of the lungs. When either man or woman has lost the ability to breathe deeply, a long road must be traveled to educate the muscles back to natural use. A man in Colorado had broncorrhœa and occasional lung hemorrhage. Although he could walk six or seven miles he could not breathe below the eighth rib. I said: “I did not know a man could live, and breathe no deeper. By all your hopes of life, you must learn to breathe. To be sure you can walk, but the muscles of your legs don’t help your respiration. You must take exercises that develop the diaphragm and abdominal muscles. Breathe down, _down_, and relieve the congestion of the upper lungs.” He said: “I have consulted many physicians the last six years, and why have none told me this before?” Several months afterward he wrote me that by simply developing the lower muscles of respiration, he had saved funeral expenses. The gymnast and vocalist take pains to teach deep breathing, which is simply restoring natural processes. The cow will low all day for her lost offspring without fatigue or hoarseness, because she does it with expiration, and breathes from her waist or flanks. The boy who roams the woods, gathers nuts and hunts squirrels and keeps his hands out of his pockets, can _hallo_ hours without weariness. He breathes naturally and uses his voice naturally. He does only what the singer and orator are taught to do, because through disuse this has become a _lost art_ to them.