outgrown, and must then be given up, or they will prove injurious.
For growing girls the expanding dress, made by Mrs. Beck, is most suitable; by a peculiar arrangement of gathering in the front of the body, the dress expands as the body moves. It is so elastic that it expands as the lungs inspire and contracts as they expire, this renders the dress extremely healthy and suitable not only for growing girls as a point of economy, but also for singers and violinists, who respectively require freedom for their chest and arms. Mrs. Beck is to be recommended not only as a maker of hygienic specialities of her own invention, for which she has taken medals at the Exhibitions of the Rational Dress Society and of the National Health Society in 1883, and at the Health Exhibition of 1884, but also as conscientiously following out the instructions of her customers, and fitting well; she is, in fact, not to be classed under the head of ordinary dressmakers, of whom I am about to speak.
Dresses should fit loosely enough to allow full expansion of the lungs, and yet not too loosely, or their weight will not be properly distributed: and here it is necessary to observe that a dress which may fit properly in one position of the body may be unduly tight in another. Dressmakers always fit their customers standing up, but from the following measurements of a girl's figure it is obvious that this custom requires some reform. For standing erect with little air in the lungs the waist measured twenty-one inches; with the lungs fully expanded,
