3 io THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the convalescent has reached the maximum, and future average, of two 

 hours per day of active out-door exercise. Languid promenades may 

 require an extension of that time ; wood-chopping will justify its re- 

 duction to an hour and a half. For rainy days there should be a cov- 

 ered wood-shed, or, better yet, an amateur carpenter-shop with a liberal 

 supply of dull saws and thick boards. Asthenic invalids will derive 

 great benefit from horseback-exercise, or even from a buckboard trip 

 with or without catch-ropes the great desideratum in autibilious 

 exercises being concussion, the sound shaking-up of the whole frame. 

 Trapeze-evolutions, spring-board and dumb-bell practice rank, there- 

 fore, highest among the gymnastic specifics ; wood-cutting and sawing 

 among the more arduous kinds of manual labor ; and trotting clown-hill 

 among the various modes of pedestrian exercise. It is worth a dys- 

 peptic's while to hire a sedan-chair to lug him to the top of an out-of- 

 the-way hill, and a boy to run him a race to the foot of it. After a 

 week or so he will be able to dispense w T ith the sedan. At the first 

 symptoms of indigestion, book-keepers, entry-clerks, authors, and edit- 

 ors should at once get a telescope-desk. Literary occupations need not 

 necessarily involve sedentary habits, though, as the alternative of a 

 standing-desk, I should prefer a Turkish writing-tablet and a square 

 yard of carpet-cloth to squat upon. But Schreber's telescope-desk en- 

 ables the writer to sit and stand by turns, and has the further advan- 

 tage of a sloping top that eases the wrist by resting the weight of the 

 arm upon the elbow. 



Cold-baths (always before dinner) may be limited to the summer 

 season ; but open bedroom- windows are de rigueur the year round. As 

 long as the bedclothes keep the couch warm, the lungs can inhale cold 

 air not only with impunity, but with the most unmistakable benefit 

 to the digestive organs. The cold nights of the South African table- 

 lands enable the Caffre to digest his barbecues of sorghum-beer and 

 rhinoceros-steaks, and the neighborhood of a glacier makes many a 

 Swiss highland hotel a stronghold of gluttony. In the dog-days it 

 can do no harm, in a sequestered region, to take a river-side ramble at 

 a time when only the moonlight watches on the meadows, for out-door 

 exercise on an oppressively sultry day may defeat its object and bring 

 on a fit of retching and nausea. Intensely cold air, on the other hand, 

 is such a powerful tonic that, in midwinter, a ten minutes' trot along 

 an icy pavement will often serve all the digestive purposes of that 

 day, though the convalescent will be surer to have fulfilled all right- 

 eousness by adding half an hour's arm-work in the wood-shed. In 

 midsummer dyspeptics sometimes deprecate exercise on the peculiar 

 plea that a long-continued muscular effort acts as a reliable astrin- 

 gent, and the testimony of a veteran gymnasium-teacher of my ac- 

 quaintance seems to confirm the physiological fact. But, in the first 

 place, a transient constipation is no very serious matter, and, besides, 

 the danger can generally be obviated by training early in the morn- 



