trained bodies. The majority of the students made but little progress. Their exercise consisted for the most part in sitting on the damp ground (or on a dry fence) and seeing the picked men of their classes engage in a violent contest for mastery. Athletics was rather a system of eliminating the weak and of selecting the already strong for the contests at ball or boating. Even in the gymnasium it was the strong who held out and continued to practice the exercises. But a system that selected the already strong rather than transformed the weak into the strong was only a sham for physical education. That sham is now in process of removal by the substituting of special courses of exercise provided by the medical gymnasiarch for each individual after special diagnosis. The athlete theory of gymnastics was a sort of survival of the old Greek and Roman customs. It was not realized that the Greeks and Romans attached not so much a hygienic value to athletics as a religious significance. The Greeks celebrated their worship of physical beauty, the gods of Olympus, by their games, and the Romans equally celebrated, not beauty, but self-sacrifice by their sports in the arena. The Greeks conceived the divine as a god-like control of the body by the mind in such a form as to produce gracefulness of carriage. The Roman worshipped the political state as the incarnation of the divine, and celebrated it by spectacles of self-sacrifice wherein human gladiators contended in the death struggle with each other or with wild beasts. This symbolized for him the struggle within each citizen who sacrificed his life or property for the safety or advancement of Rome.

Careless readers of history may suppose that all nations have culti vated bodily perfection in the same way as the Greeks and Romans, and for the same ends. But it is not so. The savage tribes seek skill in war by physical training, while we seek to increase the healthful generation of nervous energy. But many Asiatic nations have, for religious reasons, opposed physical culture as something leading to evil-as, for example, the Hindoos and the Buddhists.

The Hindoo worshipped an abstract unity, devoid of all form, which he called Brahma. His idea of the divine is defined as the negation not only of everything in nature, but also everything human. Nothing that has form, or shape, or properties, or qualities-nothing, in short, that can be distinguished from anything else, can be divine according to the thought of the Hindoo. This is a pantheism that worships a negative might which destroys everything.

If it admits that the world of finite things arises from Brahma as creator, it hastens to tell us that creation is only a dream, and that all creatures will vanish when the dream fades. There can be no hope for any individuality, according to this belief. Any art that grows up under such a religion will manifest only the nothingness of individuality, and the impossibility of its salvation. Instead of beauty as the attribute of divinity, the Hindoo studies to mortify the flesh; to shrivel up the body; to paralyze rather than to develop his muscles. Instead

of gymnastic festivals, he resorted to the severest penances, such as holding his arm over his head until it wasted away. If he could produce numbness in his body so that all feeling disappeared, he attained holiness. His divine was not divine-human, but inhuman rather.

But opposed to this oriental idea, the Greek religion made beauty the essential feature of the idea of the divine, and hence his art is created as an act of worship of the beautiful. It represents the supreme attainment of the world in pure beauty, because it is pure beauty and nothing beyond. Christianity reaches beyond beauty to holiness. Other heathen religions fall short of the Greek idea, and lack an essential element which the Greek religion possessed. The Greeks believed that the divine is at the same time human; and human not in the sense that the essence of man, his purified intellect and will, is divine, but human in the corporeal sense as well.

The gods of Olympus were thought to possess appetites and passions like men; to have bodies and live in a special place. They formed a society, or large patriarchal family. The manifestation of the divine was seen in celestial beauty. Moreover, it was supposed that the human being may, by becoming beautiful, become divine. Hence the Greek religion centered about gymnastic games. These were the Olympian, the Isthmian, the Nemean, and the Pythian games. Exercises that shall give the soul sovereignty over the body and develop it into beauty are religious in this sense. Every village had its games for physical development; these were attended by the people, who became, in time, judges of perfection in human form, just as a community that attends frequent horse races produces men that know critically the good points of a horse. It was known who was the best man at wrestling, boxing, throwing the discus, the spear, or javelin; at running, at leaping, or at the chariot and the horseback races.

Then, at less frequent intervals, there was the contest at games between neighboring villages. The successful hero carried off the crown of wild olive branches. Nearly every year there was a great national assembly of Greeks, and a contest open to all. The Olympian festival at Olympia and the Isthmian festival, near Corinth, were held the same summer; then at Argolis, in the winter of the second year afterward, was the Nemean festival, the Pythian festival near Delphi, and a second Isthmian festival occurred in the spring of the third year, and again a second Nemean festival in the summer of the fourth year of the Olympiad. The entire people, composed of independent states, united by ties of religion, assembled to celebrate this faith in the beau. tiful, and honor their successful youths. The results carried the national taste for the beautiful, as seen in the human body, to the highest degree.

The next step after the development of the personal work of art in the shape of beautiful youth, by means of the national games and the cultivation of the taste of the entire people through the spectacle of

these games, was the art of sculpture, by which these forms of beauty, realized in the athletes and existing in the minds of the people as ideals of correct taste, were fixed in stone and set up in the temples for worship. Thus Greek art was born. The statues at first were of gods and demigods exclusively. Those which have come down to us cause our unbounded astonishment at their perfection of form. It is not their resemblance to living bodies, not their anatomical exactness, that interests us, not their so-called "truth to nature," but their gracefulness and serenity-their "classic repose." Whether the statues represent gods and heroes in action or in sitting and reclining postures, there is this "repose," which means indwelling vital activity, and not mere rest as opposed to movement. In the greatest activity there is considerate purpose and perfect self-control manifested. The repose is of the soul, and not a physical repose. Even sitting and reclining figures-for example, the Theseus from the Parthenon, the torso of the Belvidereare filled with activity, so that the repose is one of voluntary selfrestraint and not the repose of the absence of vital energy. They are gracefulness itself.

Modern civilization has adopted from the Hebrew "chosen people" the idea of holiness; from the Greek the idea of beauty; from the Roman the idea of a social or civil whole as state and nation, as municipal corporation, and as free association-and it unites these ideas and subordinates each to a higher ideal. Even the Hebrew idea of holiness is subordinated to the Christian ideal of divine charity in the service of humanity. We do not approve the sacrifice of the higher interests of the soul for the beauty of the body; nor for the needs of military service; nor for the theatrical display of strength in brutal contests. We regard physical exercise as desirable for the increase of nervous energy, to be expended for rational spiritual purposes.

Our civilization is so bent on the conquest of nature and the production of wealth that it perpetually strains its supply of nervous energy and produces disaster. Here is the special problem of our time for hygiene to meet, How to restore and conserve nervous energy?

There are three factors here: First, the one of food and its proper assimilation; second, the factor of rest and sleep; third, the factor of exercise-muscular and mental. It is obvious enough that digestion requires nervous energy just as muscular and mental labor does. Hence, digestion must be given time. It must not be encroached on by bodily exercise, or by mental exercise. But what is the average amount of time required for this, and should it be total cessation from bodily and mental labor, or is light labor of both or either best for the digestive process?

Here our quantitative tables and the observations of our medical directors are to give us the true answer; not abstract, general answers like those old dogmatic answers, but definite answers, qualified to suit different temperaments and abounding with tests easily applied by

each individual. It is necessary to have the directions so specific that inexperienced youth will not err in their application. This is an age of self-educated men. The printed page is the means of such education. It is all the more necessary to surround new departures with the safeguards of printed rules and cautions.

If the chapters could be written which describe the grave mistakes committed by amateurs in the use of physical exercise as a hygienic measure, they would furnish a sufficient warning for the present gen. eration. They would describe various experiments of using midnight hours for walks and rides in the open air-the student used all his day for intellectual work and supposed that an hour or two of exercise taken at a late hour of the night-would answer his needs. Another experiment selected its period of exercise in the early morning, curtailing the period of sleep in order to secure the requisite time before breakfast. Violent physical exercise taken early in the morning is very exhaustive of nervous energy, and probably in most instances the student has cultivated nervous dyspepsia quite as much as he has cultivated his muscles. We have all read in the biography and autobiography of Thomas Carlyle the mention of his walks and horseback rides. late in the night. Everyone has had something of this kind in his own experience or in the experience of persons of his acquaintance. A distinguished laborer in the cause of education told lately his own follies in this matter. Led on by reading injudicious writings on this subject of hygiene, he had so curtailed his night's rest for the sake of morning exercise that nervous collapse resulted. His physician prescribed as the only possible remedy a long period of total rest. The hours of sleep at night were nearly doubled and a relaxation from study in the daytime was insisted upon. Relief came as a consequence.

Besides this mistake of cutting off the sleeping hours at the beginning or at the end for the sake of physical exercise, there is an equally harmful mistake of bringing the hour of exercise close to the hours for meals. Just preceding or just succeeding a meal, any exercise of a sufficiently energetic character to cause the blood to leave the organs of digestion and fill the muscles of the body or the brain is injurious and tends to produce dyspepsia. The stomach needs the greater share of the nervous energy and likewise of the arterial circulation. Dr. Sargent thinks that violent exercise should not be taken at a period so long as three hours after a meal, on account of the danger of faintness, which neutralizes the good results of such exercise. Provided the person has just taken violent exercise, the blood is diverted to the muscles and brain and away from the stomach. The taking of food at this time, when the nervous system is depleted of its vitality, is considered unfavorable to the best action of the digestive functions.

It must be admitted, too, that cold bathing, which has been so often commended with a great lack of discrimination, is another source of injury to the health when it is resorted to by persons with nervous tem

peraments or feeble constitutions, and at a time when the system has been depleted of its vital energy by work or exercise, or when the digestive organs are occupied with recently taken food.

The old rule, made by a farmer population to encourage early rising, which mentions, as its effect, health, wealth, and wisdom has made mischief with conscientious students who have supposed that early rising is in itself a good thing, even when not preceded by the precaution named in the adage, namely, "early to bed." It is a very important matter to consider that physical exercise has its best effect when it is carried on socially in the form of plays and games or contests with one's fellows. The stimulus which is derived from emula tion and interest in one's fellow students has to be compensated for by a sheer exertion of the will in the case of calisthenic exercises and in the case of prescribed athletic training by the use of weights, ladders, and the other machines of the gymnasium.

The object of gymnastic training, it has been said often enough, is to put the will into the muscles. It is to give one such control over all his muscles that each act performed by the body is performed by the use of all the muscles which nature has provided for the purpose. The farmer or the blacksmith develops a few muscles and neglects others. The gymnasium is supposed to cultivate many muscles which remain rudimentary in the original man; and here, I think, is an item of compensation which makes up for a great deal of the deleterious results coming to the imprudent gymnast who is careless about the hygienic precautions just now mentioned in relation to eating and sleeping. The gymnast-and I mean by the gymnast one who has taken sufficiently violent exercise to develop to a considerable degree the muscles of the chest, back, arms, and the other limbs-the gymnast has acquired the power of putting his will into his muscles by a slight effort. The gymnast performs all slight bodily actions--such as rising from a chair, sitting down, walking, climbing stairs, swinging his arms, turning his head, everything, in short, that he does with his body-by using many more muscles than the untrained person uses. Hence, it happens that one who has taken gymnastic exercise retains till old age the power of getting a maximum of exercise out of a minimum of bodily movement. Walking a few rods and running up and down stairs two or three times a day gives him as much exercise as the average farmer gets from two hours of farm work.

It is most important to note that gymnastic and calisthenic training, so called, are violent demands upon the will power and a rapid drain of the nervous energy. Hence, physical exercise directly after a hard lesson is not a proper sequence. The will power which has been drained by the mental work is reduced to complete exhaustion by violent physical exercise.

"Every pound of energy expended on work, either of mind or of body," says Dr. Sargent, "must be made good by food, rest, or sleep."