ay
say that it has of late years come home to me more than ever, and with
greater insistency, that innumerable ills of to-day are due to faulty
breathing and lack of correct physical exercises generally. I wonder
how many of us could conscientiously say that we devote fifteen or
twenty minutes regularly every day to the system? And yet such a great
deal could be done for health in that time! No, we "haven't time," or
we "oversleep ourselves so often," or we make some such other flimsy
excuse; but of course we ought to "make time," we ought not to
"oversleep ourselves." The fact is, rather, that most of us are too
lazy to go through the exercises, even though we may know of their
transcendent benefit. In the words of the poet: "Let us, then, be up
and doing"--that is, up in time in the morning in order to be going
through exercises such as described in this little volume.

It is within my personal knowledge, and must be within the personal
knowledge of every actively engaged physician, that but very few of us
yet have any idea, in spite of all the teaching and the advocacy of
it, of really deep and scientific breathing. If the system could be
made quite general and enforced upon us--especially when young or
adolescent--we should not see, as we do now, _thousands_ walking about
the streets whose nostrils are too narrow through insufficient
breathing, whose lungs are not properly inflated as they inspire; and,
as a consequence, who have neither the bloom nor the carriage of
health.

Perhaps if I show here how vastly important it is for us to have our
blood well oxygenated, it may be some sort of encouragement for Mrs
Lazarus's readers to persevere with and _work into their lives_ the
system she advocates and describes.

If we did not renew the oxygen in our lungs to a sufficient extent, we
should die in a few minutes. We can do without food for many days;
without water for less days, but only for a few minutes without
oxygen. Anything which tends to increase the intake of this vitally
important element, whether deeper breathing or exercises, will have a
very pronounced effect upon our general health. Now deep breathing is,
_par excellence_, the way to bring about this desirable condition. It
may interest the readers of this little book if I remind them that in
the ordinary way the total capacity of the lungs is about 340 cubic
inches; as a rule, the amount of air breathed amounts only to some 20
or 30 cubic inches, but