Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/63

 is the true method to pursue. Irregular hours of rest or for meals, eating between meals, anxiety, overwork, severe exercise, these are sure to maintain a condition of leanness.

As for the various drugs which have been suggested, their use had better be confined to simply maintaining the regularity of the natural functions. Some of the mineral waters of Germany and our own country have acquired a reputation for increasing the flesh, probably owing to the fillip they give to the digestion. These are Töplitz, Gastein, and Landeck, in Germany, and the White Sulphur and chalybeate springs in this country.

There is danger that such a bill of fare as this latter may make some people "bilious," and others gouty, if long persisted in. These tendencies may be combated by a careful attention to the regularity of the functions of the body. A glass of Congress or Bedford water, every morning before breakfast, is a salutary draught in the former case, and in the latter an equal amount of Gettysburg water will be found of service. The latter contains, it is said, a small quantity of the substance lithia, from which it derives its virtues.

Any one will more willingly run these dangers of over-feeding than adopt the method of increasing flesh recommended by Galen and some other physicians of the olden time. This was nothing more nor less than