, is a wholesome exercise for women. Those who do no
house-work seldom substitute for it any other active exercise, and many
diseases which are caused by deposits of waste tissues that are not
thrown off by the body, are the result.

Rest--recreation--pleasure--these are as necessary to health as
anything else, but the American people are slow to learn the need of
them. We hear much of nervous prostration as an American disease. It is
due to a variety of causes,--high living, late hours, ill-ventilated
rooms, and climate; but chief of all the causes is the long hours of
work under strong pressure. Work done in a hurry and without rest may
accomplish many things, but it invariably causes a corresponding loss of
nerve force. Fatigue, by checking bodily resistance, gives rise to all
kinds of poisons in the system. Every part of the body feels the ill
effect of continued exhaustion.

Of the diseases caused by bad habits, it can only be said that all the
evils they cause, directly and indirectly, are entirely preventable;
that they are usually wrong morally, and that the suffering which
results is sure.

Under this head come the effects of drinking, of the use of tobacco and
drugs, and of bad personal and social habits. It is only necessary to
refrain from these bad habits to prevent all the diseases that arise
from them, with all their train of suffering, poverty and crime.

It is not the province of this book to deal with scientific temperance,
but merely to state a few of the most serious results of the use of
alcohol and other poisons. The white corpuscles of the blood have been
called our "standing army," because they are natural germ-destroyers.
One class of the white cells has the power of motion, and another class
has the power of absorbing outside matter, such as disease-germs. One
destroys the germs and the other moves them through the blood and
carries them off with the waste products of the body.

The white corpuscles thus stand as the defenders of the body, ready to
destroy the germs as they enter, and are, for each individual, the best
of all preventives of germ diseases. The person whose blood is lacking
in white cells is always liable to "catch" contagious or infectious
diseases, and the one who has that element of the blood in proper
proportion is best fitted to withstand disease.

Leading physicians believe that the greatest harm that comes from the
use of alcohol lies in the fact that nothing else so