Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/59

 beauty, and unquestionably far more common in the young. Even in the days of St. Chrysostom, the question "how to grow stouter" appears to have been one anxiously considered by the ladies of Antioch, where the good father preached. He was not in the least inclined to indorse this vanity, and told them one day in his sermon, that "the virtue of the body does not consist in fatness, but in the capacity of bearing torments." We do not think that in this day of wasp-*like waists and tight laced figures the Saint's words would be appropriate.

Leanness like corpulence is often a family trait, and is much more frequently than that condition associated with disease. We may lay it down as a rule that when a person in seemingly good health commences to fall away in flesh, there is some lurking disorder of the nutritive system at work. Three times out of four this disorder will be found in the liver or stomach, and if taken in hand early, and treated wisely and energetically, not only will good looks but health also be rescued.

In quite a number of spare women, marriage has a singularly beneficial influence. They improve rapidly in flesh and in color. But no woman need marry for this object. We can promise her a comfortable plumpness without recourse to so risky a remedy. We explained a few pages back that some articles of food made much more fat than others. Let her live on