lo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



ited to the invention of new instruments of torture, when the neglect 

 of husbandry changed so many Elysian fields into hoj^eless deserts. 

 To these doctrines the Latin peoples owe the sickliness and effeminacy 

 which contrast their present generation with the hero-race of antiquity. 

 It is a faA^orite subterfuge of the Jesuitical apologists to ascribe that 

 degeneracy to climatic influences. A cold climate has not saved the 

 North-China votaries of Buddhism, and would not have saved the 

 North-Europeans against a prolonged influence of Hebrew Buddhism. 

 "We must not forget that in Northern Europe the rule of the anti-natu- 

 ralists did not begin before the end of the seventh century, and never 

 overcame the latent protestantism of the Teuton races. In a warmer 

 country than Italy the votaries of the manlier prophet of El Medina 

 have always preserved their physical vigor, and the representative 

 North-African of the present day is the physical superior of his South- 

 European contemporary, while the forefathers of the same African 

 were mere children in the hands of the palaestra-trained Roman war- 

 rior. 



The physical corruption of the non-Mohammedan inhabitants of 

 Southern Europe and Southern Asia has reached the incurable stage of 

 complacent effeminacy : their indifference to the vices of indolence 

 precludes the possibility of reform. Indifference to physical degra- 

 dation is, indeed, a symptom of a deep-seated disease. Mental inert- 

 ness is often but a dormant state of the intellect, a state from which 

 the sleeper may be roused at any moment by the din of war, by the 

 light of a great discovery, by the voice of an inspired poet. Physical 

 indolence is the torpor which precedes the sleep that knows no waking. 

 The civilization of Greece, Dutch art, the science of Bagdad and Cor- 

 dova, sprang up, like water from the rock of Moses. Can historians 

 point out a single instance of an unmanned people regaining their 

 manhood ? The bodily degeneracy of a whole nation dooms it to a 

 hoi:)eless retrogression in prosperity and political power. 



The first use we should make of our regained liberty is, therefore, 

 the reestablishment of those institutions to whose influence the hap- 

 piest nations of antiquity owed their energy and their physical prow- 

 ess, their martial and moral heroism, their fortitude in adversity. The 

 physical constitution of man was never intended for the sluggish inac- 

 tivity of our sedentary and Sabbatarian mode of life. In a state of 

 nature, the faculty of voluntary motion distinguishes animals from 

 plants, and our next relatives in the great family of the animal king- 

 dom are the most restlessly active of all warm-blooded creatures. The 

 children of Nature ^hunters, shepherds, and nomads pass their days 

 in out-door labor and out-door sports ; physical exercise affords them 

 at once the necessaries of life and the means of recreation, and secures 

 them against all physical ills but wounds and the infirmities of extreme 

 old age. Civilization, i. e., life on the cooperative plan, exempts many 

 individuals from the necessity of supplying their daily wants by daily 



