this simple entertainment into several different games, arduous and complicated as their games of ball.  The mere multiplication of the missiles also lends an additional stimulus, and the statistics of success in this way appear almost fabulous.  A zealous English battledoorean informs me that the highest scores yet recorded in the game are as follows:  five thousand strokes for a single shuttlecock, five hundred when employing two, one hundred and fifty with three, and fifty-two when four airy messengers are kept flying simultaneously.

It may seem trivial to urge upon rational beings the use of a shuttlecock as a duty; but this is surely better than that one’s health should become a thing as perishable, and fly away as easily.  There is no danger that our educational systems will soon grow too careless of intellect and too careful of health.  Reforms, whether in physiology or in smaller things, move slowly, when prejudice or habit bars the way.  Paris is the head-quarters of medical science; yet in Paris, to this day, the poor babies in the great hospital of La Maternite are so tortured in tight swathings that not a limb can move.  Progress is not in proportion to the amount of scientific knowledge on deposit in any country, but to the extent of its diffusion.  No nation in the world grapples with its own evils so promptly as ours.  It is but a few years since there was a general croaking about the physical deterioration of young men in our cities,—­and now already the cities and the colleges are beginning to lead the rural districts in this respect.  The guaranty of reform in American female health is to be found in the growing popular conviction that reform is needed.  The community is tired of the reproaches of foreigners, and of the more serious evils of homes desolated by disease, and lives turned to tragedies.  Morbid anatomy has long enough served as a type of feminine loveliness; our polite society has long enough been a series of soirees of incurables.  Health is coming into fashion.  A mercantile parent lately told me that already in his town, if a girl could vault a five-barred gate, her prospects for a husband were considered to be improved ten per cent.; and every one knows that there is no metre of public sentiment so infallible as the stock-market.  Now that the country is becoming safe, we must again turn our attention to the health of our girls.  Unless they are healthy, the country is not safe.  No where can their physical condition be so important as in a republic.  The utmost attention was paid to the bodily training of Victoria, because she was to be a queen and the mother of kings.  By the theory of our government, however imperfectly applied as yet, this is the precise position of every American girl.  Voltaire said that the fate of nations had often depended on the gout of a prime-minister; and the fate of our institutions may hang on the precise temperament which our next President shall have inherited from his mother.