The time is coming when parents will consider it a disgrace to allow their children to be physically undeveloped.  The physician, always in advance of the community for which he cares, sees how grave in moral or intellectual import physical defects may be.  The educational world, alive to new messages for the reconstruction of its educational ideal, begins also to place more and more emphasis upon the physical care and development of its students—­and not by any manner of means for physical reasons only but because the whole girl or the whole boy is better spiritually and mentally for having a body that is strong and well.  The whole being keeps better time, just as a watch does, for having clean works.  No one has the right to shut out the fresh air or the sunshine; no girl should remain undeveloped physically through lack of exercise when she could, through exercise, make herself strong.  Even to abuse her feet, the important centre of many important nerves, by tight shoes, is wrong; so is it to rack her spine and upset or throw out of position all the delicate and wonderfully fashioned organs of the abdominal cavity by the wearing of high French heels.  Undoubtedly, however, American motherhood and girlhood represent something more and more intelligent; indeed, in physical culture women are beginning to keep step with men, and it is upon this fact that school and college depend in their splendid efforts to make the sum of feminine vitality, despite the pressure of modern civilization, plus rather than minus.

The more exercise the less fool; and it is worth remembering that the daily exercise, the plunge into cool or clean air, as well as the plunge into water, is a wit sharpener, and will do more for a student in the long run than “digging” possibly can. Mens sana in corpore sano may be an old saying but it is still new enough to be repeated with vigour to certain people.  Let us get out-of-doors and have our wits sharpened and see more, and do more, and be more!  No one can permanently starve her whole body for the want of fresh air and exercise, which are the body’s birthright, and expect to have a clear head or do well-balanced and helpful work in the home, or in school, or in some wage-earning career.  If the girl attempt this impossibility she will be like the frog which jumped up one foot and fell back two.  She will get to the bottom soon enough, the bottom of the class or the bottom of her health account, but she will never get to the top of anything.  Any success, if by chance it should come to her, resting on a basis of ill health or indifference to her physical fitness for living and working, will be like the house built upon the sands.  Before the girl is twenty, before she is twenty-five—­the earlier the better—­she should recognize this fact and begin to establish her life on the bed rock of health.