The tremulous needle, poised upon a pivot, points to the North. The earth is a magnet, and so is the human body. Those who have read Reichenbach's "Researches in Magnetism" will not doubt this. If these are facts, people should sleep with their heads to the North, especially those living in England. The magnetic needle, however, does not point north in all countries. Sailors know this by the variations of the needle, and scientists frequently speak of its "declination." "Over the whole of Asia," says R, A. Proctor, in his " Science for Leisure Hours," "the needle points almost due north; while in the north of Greenland and of Baffin's Bay the magnetic needle points due west." So Greenlanders should sleep with their heads to the West; while Americans and Asiatics of the Orient should sleep with heads due North - sleep in harmony with the moving of the magnetic currents. " But," says some stern, flint-headed peasant, "I can sleep any way; I feel no difference." Quite likely; neither did the ox feel the difference when the fly lit upon his horn, because the horn was hard and dry and flinty. Very sensitive persons at once feel the difference.

God made the night for sleep, and the light of day for educational and industrial pursuits; and to transpose this divine order of things by sitting up until midnight and sleeping the next day by sunshine not only borders upon laziness, but sinfulness. Sin is a transgression of the law, and pain is the penalty.

Individuals of regular habits, engaged in hard, honest labor, with noble aims and a clear conscience, will generally find little trouble in sleeping, and that, too, in the early part of the night.

Fashionable city life is too viciously managed to give sufficient sleep; and many women in country villages, because of late social parties, enormous details of dress, and trashy novel reading by hot stoves, find it difficult to sleep; but Italian women manufacturing macaroni all day in the sunshine, and German women working in the field have no trouble in sleeping.

Nothing so tends to insanity, and nothing so deranges and harms the brain cells as lack of sleep. In 1879 six students in a German university resolved to go without sleep a week. Not one of them succeeded; but two of them died of brain disease, and three others were obliged to leave the institution on account of brain trouble. Night marches of an army in a hot climate, as in India, had to be abandoned, because it was found the men broke down for lack of sleep.

Study nature. In the gray of early evening sporting insects, lowing herds and the forest birds retire away for rest and sleep. If owls and bats are exceptions, it is because they are owls and bats - vilest of birds!

If the birds of the air and the flocks of the fields, obeying their God-given instincts, go to sleep when God lets down the dusky curtains of night, should not rational human beings, gifted with reason, do the same?

To prowl about in the darkness of late unseemly hours, or to sit up and read novels, substituting oil for the sun, is to violate God's natural laws.

I say to my friends and patients, "Get up; get up at five o'clock in the morning;" and I set them the example! If they want more sleep, I say, "Take it; take all you want! Take eight hours; take nine hours; take ten hours, if you choose; but take them in the early hours of night rather than by daylight. Don't insult nature!

If you get angry, take a bath and go to bed and sleep; if the world abuses you, take extra sleep; if you are dyspeptic and discontented, take a long sound sleep and, waking, you will find that all the world is smiling.

Few persons making pretensions to cleanliness will sleep in a garment worn during the day; and, certainly, all undergarments, whether worn by night or by day, should be thoroughly aired before being worn again. It is a rule among the Brahmins of India to shake every garment before adjusting it upon the body. A sleeping garment should have neither pin nor button about it.

"There should be no carpet on the floor of a sleeping-room," says Dr. Hall, "except a single strip by the side of the bed, to prevent a sudden shock by the warm foot coming in contact with a cold floor. Carpets collect dust and dirt and filth and dampness, and are the invention of laziness to save labor and hide uncleanness. "

Sleeping rooms should never be papered, and certainly not with a green-colored paper; neither should fever patients be kept in rooms where the prevailing color is red or crimson. Bed is a nerve excitant, while blue is quieting and calming.

Old people, especially if bald-headed, should sleep in nightcaps. The Asiatics and others who go bare-headed do not become bald-headed.

People should not go to bed expecting that they will drop off to sleep if hungry. The flocks graze in the fields until their appetites are satisfied, and then lie down to sleep. The babe takes its fill from the mother's breast and sweetly falls asleep. If you have a gnawing hunger in the evening, partake of a light dish, such as crackers or stale bread and milk before retiring.

Women should not make up their beds in the morning, but open them, shake up the mattresses, throw the feather beds out of one window, raise all of the other windows to let in the air and the sunshine, and then finish the work of the room in the afternoon. The sick should have their beds changed each day.

Do not go to sleep lying upon the back. Whoever saw the weary herds or proud horses fall asleep upon their backs, with their feet up in the air gyrating around loosely? They naturally drop to sleep lying upon the side or stomach. I observed during my journeying in Asia and Africa that the natives nearly always slept upon the stomach. Go to sleep, then, lying upon the right side, for the reason that while the right lung has three lobes, the left has but two, and the lower portion of the heart being more upon the left side it has greater freedom of action than it could possibly have if the weight of the right lung were pressing upon it.

Considering the tendencies to catarrh and consumption in this climate, breathing through the nostrils, whether asleep or awake, is absolutely necessary, and for the reason that those little delicate hairs along the nasal passages serve as strainers to catch the dust and floating air-particles. I have seen Indian mothers in the Far West go along by the teepees, where their papooses were being rocked by the cradling winds, and press their lips together in order to fix upon them the habit of sleeping with closed mouths. If more mouths were kept closed there would be less babbling and better health in the world.

Many sleeping apartments in hotels never see nor feel the sun's healing rays. They are damp and cheerless, and sleeping in them is next to committing suicide. Bed clothes and comfortables should be thoroughly sunned each day. Rooms warmed by furnaces are unfit for sleeping apartments, as the air becomes in part decomposed - burnt air - and unfit for inspiration. Those occupying such rooms complain of "closeness" and "dullness of spirits," and they sometimes feel and gasp for more air, something as does a fish for water when thrown out of its native element.

Young children require far more sleep than adults do; hence they should retire early and never be awakened in the morning. Nature will do that when she has her fill. To rudely shorten childhood's sleep is to shorten life. Students require all the sleep the system will take. Brain workers require more sleep than do day laborers upon farms. In deep sleep the soul repairs and builds up the impaired portions of the organism. Napoleon required, it is said, but five hours sleep out of the 24; others require seven and eight; but whether more or less, it is "tired Nature's sweet restorer."

Let there be no bed-curtains around the bed in in which you sleep; and it is never safe to have a sleeping room over a cellar because the ascending atmosphere and gaseous auras, freighted with dampness, miasmatic vapors and parasites, and very often decaying vegetable substances will impregnate the room with unhealthy and poisonous emanations.

A cellar opening inside a dwelling should be kept scrupulously clean, and should be thoroughly disinfected twice a year with chloride of lime, carbolic acid, burning sulphur and other disinfectants. An opening into the chimney for ventilation should be provided to carry off the cellar air, which would otherwise penetrate the rooms above.

Sleep produced by opium, morphine, chloral, cordials or narcotics of any kind is neither natural or beneficial. They deaden and stupefy, but do not rest or invigorate the system.

If a person be weighed at bedtime and again upon rising, it will be found that there has been a loss in weight of half a pound or more, which amount has passed off in perspiration, sensible or insensible, and been distributed through the bed-clothing and the room. Therefore I repeat, ventilate and sun your sleeping rooms.

Each individual, even to the child, should have his or her own sleeping room. Among the highly cultured classes in France and Germany even husbands and wives sleep separately, and the baby while quite young has its crib between the parents' beds; but very early the child is put into a room and bed by itself. It is wisdom to so do. The piling of two or three into the same bed, pig-like, is unnatural and unhealthy.

If the young sleep in the same room with the aged it should be for medicinal or life-giving purposes only. In youth, what the world vaguely calls the "animal spirits" - really vital nerve force - is abundant. This vital force is a fine sublimated substance, and when influenced by love and projected by the will it flows from the strong to the feeble; from the young to the aged. The child that sleeps with the grandmother grows pale and feeble; but she gains to the extent that the little one loses. The young wife soon gets to look as withered as the wrinkled old man that she marries. There are few more painful sights than to see an old man who ought to be thinking of death and eternity, readjust his glasses, dye his hair, color his beard, gormandize on oysters and then go off and marry a young girl. She marries for a home; but such homes all too often prove to be earthly hells!