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Now, there is no reason in nature why this should be so; there is nothing in the constitution of woman, that prevents her being at thirty, still fresh, healthy, and beautiful; with well-developed and erect figure, with clear and unwrinkled brow, with a luxuriant profusion of hair, and with every tooth in her head, and clear and sound as the pearl; but there are many and very sufficient reasons in the present constitution, and habits of society, and in our social and domestic arrangements. Depend upon it, the milliner, the hairdresser, and the dentist, are but funguses growing out of a rotten state of society, and that if women were what they should be, one half the doctors would emigrate, in despair; to a less enlightened and favored land.

But the point in which American women fall most below the standard of beauty, is in the figure; and this is attributed, in a great measure, to the very absurd and unnatural attempt to set up a standard of beauty, in the outline of form, exactly the reverse of nature. To man; has nature given the deep chest, the broad shoulders, the form tapering from above downwards: to woman, exactly the reverse; but fashion, tyrant fashion, condemns all this; the waist must be drawn in at all hazards, the internal organs may take care of themselves, and grow if they can; if they cannot -- no matter -- the cord must be drawn; and when the balloon sleeves filled our streets, and monopolized our side-walks, the figure of a lady in outline, looked as unnatural as would a churn set up on its small end.

Should a lady appear in the streets, with her dress arranged so as to show her figure to be in outline like that of Eve, she would be pointed at as a fright; and the Venus de Medicis would be called a dowdy, by our fashionables.

Such is not the case with the famed beauties of the East -- the women of Georgia and Circassia; with them the growth of the figure is never constrained; the dress is never drawn tight the foot is never cramped up in a shoe; the locks are never imprisoned in papers; the dentist -- the coiffeur -- the mantua-maker, are never known there, and yet they grow up erect as the pine, graceful as the gazelle, beautiful as a flower. But that which most distinguishes them, is the graceful and swan-like carriage of the neck -- the erect and easy posture of the body, which is unstayed and unsupported by art -- the perfect roundness of the tapering limbs, and the general fulness and swell of the flesh which hides every projection of bone; there is no elbow -- no collar-bone; they seem as if made of elastic ivory -- as if they had no skeleton, of the existence of which you are so frequently and disagreeably reminded here, by the angular arms, the sharp elbows, and the projecting collar-bones of our ladies.

There is, however, a more important and lamentable effect of the want of attention to the organic laws, a careless defiance of the natural tendency to hereditary transmission of infirmities. Very few consider, that they owe more to society than to their individual selves; that if we are to love our neighbor as ourself, we must of course love all our neighbors collectively, more than the single unit, which each calls, I.

As I said before, there is one great and crying evil, in our system of education, and it is that but part of man's nature is educated; that our colleges and schools doom young men, for years, to an uninterrupted and severe exercise of the intellectual faculties, to the comparative neglect of their moral, and still more of their physical nature. Nay! many students not only neglect their physical nature, but they abuse it; they sin against themselves, and against God; and though they sin in ignorance, they do not escape the penalties of his violated laws. Hence you see them, pale, and wan, and feeble; hence, you often find one acknowledging, when too late, the effects of severe application. But does he acknowledge it humbly and repentingly, as with a consciousness of sin? No; it is often with a secret exultation, with a lurking feeling, that you will say or think, "poor fellow, his mind is too much for his body!" But, in truth; his mind is too weak, his knowledge too limited, he is an imperfect man, for he knows not his own nature.

But, if there is no conscientiousness, no scruple about impairing one's own health, and sowing the seeds of disease, there is less about entailing them upon others; and consumptive men or women, the sons or daughters of consumptive parents, hesitate not to spread the evil in society, to entail a puny frame, weakness, pain, and early death upon several individuals, and punish their children for their own sins. Is this picture too high colored? Alas! no. And if, as I shall show you satisfactorily, sin against the organic laws, causes among us so large a proportion of insanity, how much more readily will you grant, that the same sin gives to many of our population the narrow chest, the hectic flush, the hollow cough, which marks the victim doomed by his parent to consumption and early death.