THE OFFENSIVE TRAILING SKIRT.
A DISTINGUISHED scientist at Rome, Dr. Casagrandi, in an address at a congress lately held in that city, told his colleagues that he had been making some simple experiments to show the abuses of trailing skirts. He employed, he said, a number of women wearing long skirts, to walk for one hour through the streets of the city, and after their promenade was over, he took their skirts and submitted them to a careful examination. As a result, he found on each skirt large colonies of noxious germs, including those of influenza, consumption, typhoid fever, and tetanus. The bacilli of minor diseases were also well represented on each skirt. Dr. Casagrandi maintained that, in view of these facts, women, and especially mothers, ought at once to stop wearing long skirts; and the other members of the congress unhesitatingly expressed the same opinion, and passed a resolution to this effect. A French writer, commenting on these experiments, says that the time may not be far off when all women will wear short bicycle skirts, and that the sooner this time comes, the better pleased will be all those who have made a study of hygiene, and who know how dangerous to public health the long skirt is. That women should willingly subject themselves to the danger as well as the filth of the trailing skirt, is a subject of perpetual wonder.