12 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 







lation dress of the Swedish turners is, in this respect, also the best 

 dress for children a light jacket, wide trousers and shirts, and broad, 

 low-heeled shoes ; in-doors, and in summer-time, shoes and stockings 

 should often be altogether dispensed with. Stephens, the celebrated 

 English trainer, remarked that only men who have their toes perfectly 

 straight will make first-rate runners and wrestlers, and this qualifica- 

 tion is nowadays a privilege of country lads who are permitted (or 

 obliged) to run around barefoot all summer. Considering the way 

 we treat our feet, it must often puzzle us what our toes were made 

 for, anyhow ; but the antics of a baby in the cradle prove that the hu- 

 man foot is by nature semi-prehensile, and might be developed into a 

 sort of under-hand. Hindoo pickpockets " crib " with their toes, while 

 they stand with folded arms in a crowd, and the Languedoc cork- 

 gatherers ply their trade without a ladder, trusting their lives to the 

 grasping power of their feet. The structural proportions of a new- 

 born child also show a comparatively unimportant difference in the 

 size of the lower and upper extremities ; but, in the course of the first 

 twelve years, this difference increases from 2 : 5 to 1 : 3, and often as 

 much as 1 : 4 ; in other words, while an infant's two arms weigh nearly 

 as much as one of its legs, the arm-weight of a schoolboy is often 

 only one fourth of his leg-weight. The reason is that, of all the active 

 exercise a child gets, nine tenths fall generally to the share of its lower 

 extremities. A little child can not stand erect ; the task of supporting 

 the weight of the whole body on two feet exceeds its untried strength. 

 But in local progression we do more : taking a step means to support 

 and propel, or even lift, the whole body by means of the foot remain- 

 ing on the ground. In running up and down stairs, to school and 

 back, and here and there about the house, the legs of the laziest 

 schoolboy perform that feat about eight thousand times a day. What 

 have his arms done in the mean while ? Carried a chair across the 

 room, perhaps, or elevated so and so many spoonfuls of hash from the 

 plate to a place six inches farther up, besides supporting the weight of 

 three or four ounces of clothing. To equalize this difference should 

 therefore be the primary object of physical culture, for the harmo- 

 nious structure of all its parts is an essential condition of a perfectly 

 developed body. No malformation is more common in city recruits 

 than a narrow chest. Besides spear -throwing, of which I shall speak 

 further on, any e^cercise promoting the development of the shoulder- 

 muscles will tend to expand the chest, and thus remove the chief pre- 

 disposing cause of consumption. In a climate where the first four 

 years of a child's life have to be passed mostly in-doors, a special room 

 of a spacious house or a corner reservation of a small nursery should 

 be set apart for arm-exercises hurling, swinging, and lifting. The 

 arrangements for the propulsive part of the good work need not go 

 beyond an old bolster and a cushion-target, but the grapple-swing 

 should be both safe and handy a pair of swinging-rings suspended 



