“The results of this social change have been on the whole beneficial beyond expectation. The health of women generally is improving under the change; there is amongst women generally less bloodlessness, less of what the old fiction-writers called swooning; less of lassitude, less of nervousness, less of hysteria, and much less of that general debility to which, for want of a better term, the words ‘_malaise_’ and ‘languor’ have been applied. Woman, in a word, is stronger than she was in olden time. With this increase of strength woman has gained in development of body and of limb. She has become less distortioned. The curved back, the pigeon-shaped chest, the disproportioned limb, the narrow feeble trunk, the small and often distorted eyeball, the myopic eye, and puny ill-shaped external ear—all these parts are becoming of better and more natural _contour_. The muscles are also becoming more equally and more fully developed, and with these improvements, there are growing up amongst women models who may, in due time, vie with the best models that old Greek culture has left for us to study in its undying art.”—Dr. Richardson (“The Young Woman,” Oct., 1892). _Id._—“... prophetic scenes, Spiritual projections ... In one, the sacred parturition scene, A happy, painless mother births a perfect child.” —Walt Whitman (“Autumn Rivulets”). _Id._... “I am so rapt in the beauty of the human form, and so earnestly, so inexpressibly prayerful to see that form perfect, that my full thought is not to be written.... It is absolutely incontrovertible that the ideal shape of the human being is attainable to the exclusion of deformities.... When the ambition of the multitude is fixed on the ideal form and beauty, then that ideal will become immediately possible, and a marked advance towards it could be made in three generations.”—Richard Jefferies (“The Story of My Heart,” pp. 32, 151, 131). _Id._... “‘The Gods?’ In yourselves will ye see them, when Venus shall favour your love, And man, fitly mated with woman, believes that his love is divine: When passion shall elevate woman to something so holy and grand That she—the ideal enraptured—shall ne’er be a check upon Man, Then the children they bear will be holy, and beauty shall make them her own, And man in the eyes of his neighbour will gaze on the reflex divine Of the God he inclines to in spirit—or trace in each feature and limb The lines which the body inherits from souls which are noble and true.