PHYSICAL EDUCATION, 13 







at a height of about four feet from the floor above a stratum of old 

 quilts and carpets. In London, and in some of our Northeastern cities, 

 health-lifts for children can now be got very cheap ; weighted buck- 

 ets, however, or sand-bags with strap-handles, will serve nearly the 

 same purpose ; and smaller bags of that kind may be used for various 

 dumb-bell exercises. A plurality of young gymnasts can vary the 

 programme by throwing such bags to each other and catching them 

 with outstretched arms. In a suitable locality I would add a knotted 

 rope, fastened to the ceiling by means of a screw-hook, and hanging 

 down in a single or double chain, which children soon learn to climb 

 by the hand -over-hand process, thus strengthening the triceps and 

 flexor muscles, to whose development the quadrumana owe their pecul- 

 iar arm-power. A full-grown man who has passed his life behind the 

 counter will find it rather difiicult to raise his body by the contraction 

 of his arm-muscles, but, unless Darwin is right, Heaven must have in- 

 tended us to pursue the culture of our higher virtues in the tree-tops, 

 after the manner of the gymnosophists, for a young child acquires all 

 climbing tricks with a quite amazing facility ^much readier, in fact, 

 than the art of biped progression, whose chief difficulty consists, per- 

 haps, in the necessity of preserving the equilibrium. The knots should 

 be far enough apart to tempt an enterprising climber to dispense with 

 their use now and then and rely on the power of his grasp by seizing 

 the rope at the interspaces ; and this exercise should be especially en- 

 couraged, for the strength and suppleness of the wrist-joint will con- 

 siderably facilitate the attainment of " polytechnic skill," as modern 

 Jacks-of-all-trades begin to call their versatile handiness. Nay, the 

 Rev. Salzmann holds that the ancient practice of hand-shaking was 

 originally suggested by the wish to ascertain the wrist-power and con- 

 sequent wrestling capacity of a stranger. As to the rest, negative 

 precautions will generally suffice for the first three or four years. 

 Diminish the danger of a fall by padding the floor of your nursery- 

 gymnasium, and the restless mobility of your pupils will generally 

 save you the trouble of initiating them in the rudiments of hopping 

 and tumbling. But make it a rule with all hired or amateur nursery- 

 maids that the children must not be carried more than is absolutely 

 necessary. 



In long winters it can do no harm, now and then, to let the young- 

 sters turn the hall into a race-course ; but, with the firet warm weather, 

 the arena should be removed to the next playground a garden-lane, 

 or a vacant lot without rubbish-heaps, if the Park Commissioners are 

 too proscriptive. In its general invigorating effect on the organic sys- 

 tem, running surpasses every other kind of exercise. Among the con- 

 tests of the palaestra it ranked above wrestling and boxing ; for more 

 than two hundred years the Olympic games consisted, indeed, exclu- 

 sively of foot-races, and the chronological era of Greece dated from 

 the year when the Elean Coroebus defeated his Peloponnesian competi- 



