Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/215

 that from October to the end of May, in this climate, every person who would guard either health or beauty must wear an ample undergarment of either silk or wool. It may be worn over one of linen if preferred. Many will find it prudent to continue the use of a lighter variety, a merino or silk gauze, through the summer months also.

Even the color of the garment next the skin must not be overlooked. There is a time-honored notion, familiar to every one, that red flannel has some peculiar virtue about it. The old women recommend it for "rheumatiz" and "stiff joints." However well-founded this venerable prepossession may have been in the good old times when the dye-stuffs were derived from vegetable extracts, we regret that we must throw discredit on it at present. Many of the reds now employed in the arts are obtained from coal-oil and from the salts of mercury, both of which contain acrid and poisonous principles. Within a year or two a number of cases have been reported, where painful cutaneous diseases arose from wearing articles thus dyed.

One young gentleman, mentioned by Dr. Tardieu of Paris, who seemed to fancy, with Sir Andrew Aguecheek, that his leg "looked indifferent well in a flame-colored stock," sent in haste for his physician the next morning after wearing a pair. Precisely so far as the