DAN′CING

The practice of dancing as an amusement or exercise must be almost as old as the human race itself. Yet, notwithstanding its antiquity and prevalence amongst all nations, both barbarous and refined, the propriety and advantages of its cultivation are of a very questionable character. In a hygienic point of view it can claim no preference, as an exercise, over the more simple ones of walking and running; whilst, from the a ociations it frequently induces, and the heated and confined atmosphere in which its votaries commonly a emble to indulge in it, it becomes the fertile parent of immorality and consumption. A celebrated cyclopædist has, perhaps harshly, but truthfully, defined dancing to be “a silly amusement for the idle and thoughtle .”