8 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



body had brought on a mortal disease. For the idea that the suprem- 

 acy of the mind could be enforced by debilitating penances is a fatal 

 mistake ; an enervated body, instead of ministering to the needs of the 

 mind, becomes its tyrant, a querulous, capricious, and exorbitant mas- 

 ter. Every hospital attendant knows that, with the rarest exceptions, 

 the sufferers from exhausting diseases have no more self-control than 

 a fretful child. Neither can the progress of our mechanical industries 

 be made a pretext for undervaluing the advantages of an athletic edu- 

 cation. It has been prophesied that the time will come when the auto- 

 crat of the breakfast-table shall break his e^g with a dynamite w^afer ; 

 but, unless we invent a labor-saving contrivance for every muscle of 

 the human organism, there is not a day in the year nor an hour in the 

 day when the practical business of life can not be performed more 

 easily and more pleasantly with the aid of a vigorous body, not to re- 

 mention the moral disadvantages which never fail to attend the loss of 

 manly self-reliance. Active exercises also confer beauty of form and ^ 

 natural grace of deportment. " By their system of jihysical culture," 

 says a Scotch author, " the Greeks realized that beautiful symmetry 

 of shape which for us exists only in the ideal, or in the forms of di- 

 vinity which they sculptured from figures of such' perfect proportions." 

 That a man's welfare in every sense of the word depends upon the 

 normal development, of his body might, therefore, seem an axiom 

 whose self -evidence could be questioned only in a fit of insane infatu- 

 ation ; yet an Oriental fanatic has succeeded in tainting countless mill- 

 ions of his fellow-men with this very insanity. About six hundred 

 years before the beginning of our chronological era, a speculative 

 philosopher of northern Hindostan set about to investigate the origin 

 of the sufferino's which so often make human life a burden instead of 

 a blessing, and, failing to trace these afflictions to any avoidable cause, 

 he took it into his head that terrestrial existence itself must be an 

 evil, and conceived the unhappy idea of preaching a crusade against 

 the love of earth and the rights of the human body, as distinct from 

 a supposed preternatural part of our being. His success has been, 

 beyond all compare, the greatest calamity that ever befell the human 

 race since the days of the traditional deluge ; not only that the doc- 

 trines of Gautama bore their fruit in the utter physical degeneration 

 of his native country, and the populous empires of Eastern Asia, but, 

 seven centuries after, the essential doctrines of Buddhism, intensified 

 by an admixture of Gnostic demonism and Hebrew mythology, were 

 preached upon the shores of the Mediterranean and invaded the para- 

 dise of the Aryan nations. A mania of self-torture and miracle-wor- 

 ship broke out like a mental epidemic, and, at the very time when the 

 influence of Grecian civilization began to wane, the new creed spread 

 into Italy, and the friends of science and freedom were confronted 

 with the fearful danger of an anti-natural religion. What that dan- 

 ger meant, our liberated age can hardly realize unless we review the 



