PHYSICAL education: 23 



The Manitoba lumbermen ply their hard trade cheerfully for ten 

 hours a day for months together, and the pastoral nomads of the Cas- 

 pian steppes often keej) their boys in the saddle for two days and two 

 nights. 



It can do no harm to let girls join in the athletic sports of their 

 brothers ; though in their case an harmonious structural development is 

 of more importance than the attainment of muscular strength. Their 

 natural vocation exempts them from the necessity of engaging in vio- 

 lent exercises, and the experience of every nation has confirmed the 

 somewhat obscure biological fact that a child's bodily constitution de- 

 pends chiefly on that of his paternal relatives. A weakling can never 

 become the father of robust children ; while a delicate but otherwise 

 healthy woman may give birth to an infant Hercules. But, for boys, 

 the most thorough physical education is the best ; a child can never 

 be too weakly to profit by gymnastic exercises. If the culture of the 

 bodily faculties wxre made a regular branch of public education, ro- 

 bust strength would be the rule and debility the rare exception. The 

 puniness and sickliness of the vast plurality of our city boys are indeed 

 something altogether abnormal. If our primogenitor (as we have no 

 reason to doubt) surpassed the other primates of the animal kingdom 

 in strength as much as he still exceeds them in size, he must have been 

 fully able to hold his own against any beast of prey. Dr. Clarke Abel's 

 undoubtedly authentic description of an orang-outang hunt near Ran- 

 goon, on the northwest coast of Sumatra, reads like an episode from 

 the " Lay of the Nibelungen," rather than like the account of a con- 

 scientious and scientific observer. With five bullets in his body, the 

 hairy half -man still leaped from tree to tree with the agility of a pan- 

 ther, survived the fall of the last tree, and, though crippled by a shower 

 of blows, snatched a spear from the hands of his chief assailant and 

 broke it like a rotten stick. On his campaign against a horde of north- 

 ern barbarians, one of Trajan's generals attempted to scare, or at least 

 to astonish, the natives by shipping a troop of lions across the Danube. 

 But the children of Nature declined to marvel : " They mistook them 

 for dogs," says the historian, " and knocked their brains out." Even 

 after the middle of the fourteenth century the levy of a small German 

 burgh could turn out more athletes than the combined armies of the 

 present empire ; the Margrave of Nuremberg could at any time muster 

 ten thousand men, every one of whom was able to wear and use accou- 

 trements that would crush a so-called strong man of the present day. 

 In the armories of Vienna, Brunswick, and Strasburg there are coats 

 of mail which a modern porter would hesitate to shoulder without the 

 assistance of a comrade. 



And yet these mediaeval Samsons were the exclusive product of the 

 drill-ground ; physical vigor was not valued as the foundation of health 

 and happiness, but rather as a means of military efiiciency ; the guar- 

 dians of public education merely connived at such things ; and, when 



