A RECRUIT, on entering the French army, is early taught to swim. Water, when it becomes familiar, is the best of friends.

Soldiers have been known to march fifteen miles further (after a long march) under a sultry sun, when the officers have given them orders to bathe for half an hour. The recruit is enticed to the river on a sultry broiling day. There the fear of water naturally seizes him; but he is intrusted to the hands of a veteran swimmer, who gives him his first lesson, and, little by little, he becomes expert: he learns to dive, too, and ascertain the nature of a river bed, so that the engineer may judge from his report what sort of bridge may be thrown across a stream. He is taught how to swim a long time, how to rest himself, how to save a companion; he is trained to swim with his clothes on, to carry his musket dry, and to practice a thousand dodges, by which he may approach, unnoticed, the opposite bank of a river, where an enemy is encamped.

The medical authorities of the French army recommend that men inclined to diseases of the chest should be frequently made to swim. The following are the effects (which M. Le Dr. DUDON attributes to swimming) on the organs of respiration :—" A swimmer wishing to proceed from one place to another, is obliged to deploy his arms and legs to cut through the liquid, and to beat the water with them to sustain himself.

It is to the chest, as being the central point of sustentation, that every movement of the limbs responds. This irradiation of the movements to the chest, far from being hurtful to it, is beneficial ; for according to a sacred principle of physiology, the more an organ is put in action, the more vigour and aptitude it will gain to perform its functions. Applying this principle unto natation, it will easily be conceived how the membranes of the chest of a swimmer acquire development—the pulmonary tissues firmness, tone, and energy." We are glad to observe that this useful art is now rapidly becoming popular. A few years ago, not one in a hundred could swim—and such was particularly the case amongst our seamen and fishermen. Observing this lamentable deficiency amongst a class of our countrymen whose vocation calls them to spend more than half their time on the water, induced the NATIONAL LIFE-BOAT INSTITUTION, six or seven years ago, to direct public attention to the subject.

Cases had often been brought under its notice of persons perishing simply because they could not swim a few yards. Happily such a state of things is rapidly disappearing, and high and low are now practising the useful art with an assiduity becoming its importance ; and we trust the day is not distant when it will become a part of the education of all classes of people.

It may here be mentioned as a fact not generally known, that when a person is drowning, if he is taken by the arm from behind, between the elbow and shoulder, he cannot touch the person attempting to save him, and whatever struggles he may make will only assist the person holding him in keeping his head above water. A good swimmer can keep a man thus above the water for an hour. If seized by any other part of the body, the probability is that he will clutch the swimmer, and perhaps, as is often the case, both will be drowned.