throwing stones, are mentioned, we fancy, somewhere by Plato as two employments particularly adapted to the physical education of women. Since the days of the Roman Thermæ our idea of gymnastic exercises, as we shall see from a consideration of the examples we have mentioned, has been greatly limited. Neither the swing nor the see-saw is admitted under the modern category, and the hoop and ball, the favourite athletic games of Imperial Rome, are confined to the nursery or the preparatory establishment. Rope dancing is now banished to the stage, and a commission of lunacy would certainly be issued at the promotion of interested friends and relations against any one who should propose to restore the Acrochirismus or the Sciamachia. The tendency of the Roman school was to multiply their methods of exercise inconveniently and unnecessarily, that of the present day is rather to circumscribe them within too limited a compass. It has been asserted, for instance, that exercise to confer benefit must be pleasing: that the worker on the treadmill derives no benefit from his labours. It appears to us that this assertion is hasty and incorrect. We have no experience ourselves as to the effect of treadmill exercise, but the brawny arms of the village smith, whose muscles are poetically stated to stand out like iron bands would lead us to a different conclusion. It cannot be said that the blacksmith finds pleasure in beating horse shoes, but his muscular development is certainly improved by the process. Again, the exercise of the trapezium is not strictly pleasurable, but is it, therefore, the least useful of gymnastic exercises? The compulsory use of this instrument, which is, in fact, a sine quâ non: in gymnastic education, in the pupil's daily programme, must lead us to answer the question in the negative. Mr. Maclaren, an authority under whose able guidance the University of Oxford is steadily improving in physical culture, was, and we hope still continues to be, a great friend to the trapezium, and took it under his especial superintendence. Exercise, whether pleasing or not pleasing, is equally advantageous. The same degree of perspiration, the same muscular action is produced, the same results of sound repose, strength, and health necessarily follow. That exercise should be pleasing to be attractive, is a different proposition; no man would go to the treadmill voluntarily from love of the machine, and very few, it may be, to the trapezium. But attraction in the least pleasing of exercises can always be produced by competition. A steeple-chase has in itself the pleasure of excitement, but even here the pleasure is greatly augmented by competition. But in the case of a flat race of a mile and a half, the runner would surely find the exercise dull, monotonous, and unpleasant to the last degree, unless an extraneous pleasure were induced by competition. The knowledge of this fact, and the social instinct of mankind, has led to the formation of clubs and societies and the establishment of prizes for the successful competitor. Perhaps not the least advantage which is derived from muscular, active exercise, as opposed to passive exercise-by which we refer to a ride in a carriage, or a sail in a vessel, in which latter case the abdo minal muscles are the only ones actively exercised-is cleanliness. We mention this, as it has been little insisted on by the advocates of gymnastic training. It belongs rather, perhaps, to a treatise on medicinal than athletic gymnastics; but the two are at the present day, as we have said, happily incorporated. A microscope will show the millions of drains with which the skin is perforated, for the sake of avoiding effete matter. This effete matter can only be thrown off by perspiration, produced by exercise. If it is not thrown off, it is absorbed into the system, and diseases, particularly consumption, and premature death, are the result. The result is produced by the canals of the skin becoming clogged, which not only prevents the refuse matter from coming out, but also prevents oxygen, which is essential to life, from coming in. We do not breathe with the lungs only, consuming carbon and other matter, and renewing the blood with oxygen as it passes through them. The skin also is a respiratory organ; some animals have no lungs, and breathe entirely with the skin; others with a portion of the skin modified into gills, or rudimentary lungs. In animals of a higher grade, though the lungs are the instruments principally devoted to this function, the skin retains it still to such an extent that to interfere with its pores is highly dangerous; but to arrest their operation, fatal. The breathing of the skin may be easily proved by the simple experiment of placing the hand in a basin of cold water, when it will be soon covered by minute bubbles of carbonic acid. But a more complete and scientific proof is afforded by inserting it in a vessel of oxygen, when the gas will, after a short interval of time, be replaced by carbonic acid. "We all know," says Dr. Brereton, "from daily experience, the intimate sympathy which exists between the skin and lungs, and when we are walking fast, how much more easily we get along after having broken out into a perspiration; if we are riding our horse freshens up under the same condition." In these homely words he is indirectly proving the chief sanitary characteristic of medicinal gymnastics. We have most of us heard of the story of the unfortunate child who, to add solemnity and symbolic happiness to the inauguration of Leo X. as Pope of Rome, was gilded over at Florence, to represent the Golden Age. The career of that child so conditioned, was brilliant, but brief. It of course died in a few hours. One of the reasons of the greater danger of extensive burns or scalds compared with others, smaller though deeper, is the fact that the former exclude a greater surface of skin from the oxygen of the air. Mr. Fourcault, a distinguished French physiologist, whose admiration of science appears to have led him to care little for the infliction of torture on other animals than himself, sacrificed a great number of guinea pigs, rabbits, and cats, by varnishing over the whole of their skin, contemplating with satisfaction the invariable result-death-as a demonstrative proof that the skin breathes. One word more. It has been imagined that gymnastic exercise is exclusively profitable to the young. It is not so; it is of advantage, of great advantage likewise to the old. Young persons-we include, of * course, women, and wish that callisthenics, which we suppose to be a species of female gymnastics, were more systematised and popular-need little exhortation to exercise, since, by nature, motion is their chief desire; but they stand in need of advice and moderation, since, as they do everything immoderately, so they are accustomed to take too much. exercise, and of an improper character, a course of proceeding not without danger. On the contrary, with older men, the increasing weight of the body, and the loss of the so-called "animal spirits," † induces the desire of repose, and they need an increase of exercise beyond that which inclination enjoins on them. Thus they are brought within the province of the gymnastic code. It has been said that Nature is an all-sufficient guide in this respect. This is true of our proper rational nature, but not of mere individual inclination, to which the apophthegm is more frequently applied. Children, who by reason of the tenderness of their age, are incapable of reason, live indeed according to nature, but rather to that of brutes than of men. This element of superiority which we possess over the rest of the animate creation, tells, or was intended to tell, men of advanced years, if they would but listen to it, that exercise is necessary to their increased age, since the natural heat of the body then becomes weaker, and it is less able to purge itself of those superfluities which, by gathering and resting therein cause, at first, considerable inconvenience, at the last, decay and dissolution. Folle decet pueros ludere, folle senes, said Martial eighteen hundred years ago, and the advice has been rejected since by desuetude rather than by common sense. Though the exercise mentioned has not the magical effect of beauty A withered hermit, fourscore winters worn, some perceptible advantage may yet be obtained by any old man who will be childish enough to play at ball. Arist. Eth. : πάντα ἄγαν πράττουσι. † An expression of popular interest, which appears to have originated in the philosophy of Leibnitz, F mankind, and especially woman-kind, only knew how to meddle means to mar, Lady Penrose, by the discretion which is the better part of speech, would have put off the end of Lord Lisburn's drift by perhaps as much as a day. A day does not sound much, but then everything at last happens in a day: the greatest general, social as well as military, is he or she who best understands two things-the infinite value of exactly twenty-four hours, and how to compel one's adversary to act first and therefore to throw the almost certain risk of blundering upon him. Zelda lighted her lamp and said nothing-Lord Lisburn tried to help her, and said as little. He felt singularly stupid, not from shyness, but because what he had to say, and what he had made up his mind to say, seemed only attainable by a long process of trying to explain the inexplicable. He could not help feeling a little like a sultan about to throw the handkerchief, and half the excitement of the experiment is lost when the acceptance of the missile is a foregone conclusion. He had managed to convince himself that he was very much in love indeed, so that to make a proposal of marriage without the conventional preliminaries of courtship seemed almost brutal. |