Surely “the commonplace is the highest place.”  Or rather, there are no hierarchies of the soul.  Artist or seamstress or carpenter, we live by the glory that flows to us through whatever curtains of environment are round us.

I have not a word of criticism for the writer’s ideal.  All that I would suggest is that the ideal is really present in the world, “common” as the “everyday” flowers at his feet.  Not all can sing or paint or write, but many more can laugh or run and all, perhaps, can love and pray.

 L.E.  HAWKS.

 ON LEARNING TO BREATHE.[18]

 [18] This is article has been specially written as a preface for
 Health Through Breathing, by Olga Lazarus, shortly to be published
 (1s. net).

To breathe correctly and sufficiently is to live more healthily.  This dictum is incontrovertible, and it becomes my pleasant duty herein to demonstrate its truthfulness.  And, after a careful perusal of the hundred exercises which the authoress has so clearly and succinctly described, I am still more convinced of the very great, one might almost say of the tremendous, importance of deep-breathing exercises.  What has struck me so forcibly in this little book is the fact that there is no undue enthusiasm evident; no embellishment of the subject; no extravagant claims for the system advocated; just a plain sane, sober and intelligent description of procedures of immense value to all who would either keep, or improve, their health.  The authoress has, as it were, laid before the reader a feast of good things in the way of physical culture, and leaves it at that.  She seems to have brought into purview a splendid variation of the exercises, and indeed every mode of breathing and exercise likely to be beneficial—­to those in health as out of it.

Reverting for a moment to the supreme importance of the subject, I may say that it has of late years come home to me more than ever, and with greater insistency, that innumerable ills of to-day are due to faulty breathing and lack of correct physical exercises generally.  I wonder how many of us could conscientiously say that we devote fifteen or twenty minutes regularly every day to the system?  And yet such a great deal could be done for health in that time!  No, we “haven’t time,” or we “oversleep ourselves so often,” or we make some such other flimsy excuse; but of course we ought to “make time,” we ought not to “oversleep ourselves.”  The fact is, rather, that most of us are too lazy to go through the exercises, even though we may know of their transcendent benefit.  In the words of the poet:  “Let us, then, be up and doing”—­that is, up in time in the morning in order to be going through exercises such as described in this little volume.

It is within my personal knowledge, and must be within the personal knowledge of every actively engaged physician, that but very few of us yet have