Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/159

Rh which fashion and effeminacy load us with. Five hundred millions of our fellow-men wear scarcely any clothing—not in Africa and Southern Asia only, but in cold Patagonia and the by no means genial latitudes of the Norfolk Islands. The mantle of the Roman peasant was laid aside in cold weather and generally at the beginning of the day's work. The sculptures of Rome and Greece abound with the representations of nude hunters, shepherds, and artisans. On the friezes of Pompey and the countless vases and entablatures of the Museo Borbonico and the Vatican collection, children, almost without any exception, appear in naturalibus. The very word gymnasium was derived from γυμνόσ, naked; and there is every reason to believe that the toga virilis, like the toga prœtexta, was worn only on state occasions. Henry's "History of Great Britain" (vol. i, pp. 468, 469) leaves hardly any doubt that the ancient Britons, Picts, and Scots were either wholly or almost naked, "unless their custom of painting their bodies can be considered as clothing." Nor did the south Britons and Romans go naked from poverty, like Darwin's Firelanders. They had clothes, but they reserved them for emergencies, and, though our advanced notions of decency and cleanliness might not permit us to emulate their example, I suspect that, from May to November, the lightest suit of clothes is, from an hygienic standpoint, about the best. The body breathes through the pores as well as through the lungs, and heavy garments obstruct the cutaneous exhalations quite as much as the atmosphere of an overheated room impedes the process of respiration, and it has been found by actual experiments that the weight of a mantle or heavy coat with woolen shirts and other underwear diminishes the respiratory capacity of the lungs from twenty to twenty-five per cent.—(Coale's "Hints on Health," p. 104.)

Besides, it seems that fresh air exercises on the human skin a certain tonic influence, of which the wearer of thick woolen garments deprives his body. Benjamin Franklin proposed to prevent colds, and even small-pox, by air-baths, and found that he could relieve insomnia by simply removing the bedclothes for a couple of minutes. "I rise early almost every morning," says he, "and sit in my chamber without any clothes whatever, half an hour or an hour, according to the season, either reading or writing. This practice is not the least painful but, on the contrary, agreeable, and if I return to bed afterward, before I dress myself, as it sometimes happens, I make a supplement to my night's rest of one or two hours of the most pleasing sleep that can be imagined."—("A New Mode of Bathing," Franklin's "Essays," p. 215.)

Nor should we forget the incidental advantages of hardy habits, their invigorating influence on the constitution in general and on the digestive system in particular, nor the fact that effeminacy defeats its own object and exposes its slaves to sufferings unknown to the sons of the wilderness. He who restricts himself to a minimum of clothes in