the diet table be strictly observed, and although we know that the use of some of the drugs we mention assists the effects of diet, they can nearly always be dispensed with.
ON LEANNESS.
All this time our fat friends have been crowding upon us, and we have only said a word to the spare ones. Now their term is come. We have matter of consolation for them too. They need it, poor things. There are countries in the world where a woman ever so fat, even if she rivals the famous Daniel Lambert, who weighed seven hundred and thirty-nine pounds, will be esteemed only the more attractive. But a scrawny bony figure—this is, like poor poetry, intolerable to gods and men. The only lady who we ever heard derived advantage from such an appearance was Madame Ida Pfeiffer. She relates that somewhere in her African travels the natives had a mind to kill and eat her, but she looked so unpalatably lean and tough that the temptation was not strong enough, and thus her life was saved.
Probably if a census were taken with this object in view, we would find more persons who wish to increase their weight than there are who are anxious to decrease it. We hear more complaints from the stout, because obesity is a more troublesome condition than excessive spareness. But the latter is quite as fatal to
