LITERARY NOTICES. 



127 



the childish nature to neglect those 

 studies which are best suited to this 

 stage of his unfolding faculties. 



LITERARY NOTICES. 



Physical Education ; or, the Health Laws 

 of Nature. By Felix L. Oswald, M. D. 

 New York : D. Appleton & Co. Pp. 259. 

 Price, $1. 



The health papers contributed by Dr. 

 Oswald to the " Monthly " during the past 

 year, having been revised by the author, are 

 now issued in a separate form, and, as we 

 are glad to see, at a price which will favor 

 their wide circulation. We call attention 

 to some points of interest in this remark- 

 able little book. 



In the first place, it must be said that 

 the author is no mere unpractical theorizer. 

 He is a medical man of thorough prepara- 

 tion and large professional experience, and 

 an extensively traveled student of nature 

 and of men. While in charge of a military 

 hospital at Vera Cruz, his own health broke 

 down from long exposure in a malarial re- 

 gion, and he then struck for the Mexican 

 mountains, where he became director of 

 another medical establishment. He there 

 spent eight years, making many excursions 

 to explore the imperfectly known Mexican 

 highlands, and he has given the results of 

 his observations and adventures in his 

 " Summer-land Sketches,' 5 one of the most 

 interesting and instructive books of travel 

 that has appeared in a long time. 



Dr. Oswald has also journeyed extensive- 

 ly in Europe, South America, and the United 

 States, and always as an open-eyed, absorbed 

 observer of nature and of men. So active 

 a career we might suppose not to be in the 

 highest degree favorable to superior literary 

 work, which we are accustomed to expect only 

 from the devotees of scholarship, who con- 

 centrate themselves upon books in the soli- 

 tude of their libraries. And yet Dr. Oswald's 

 merits as a writer are of a very high order. 

 He has a genius in - the use of language 

 which is less a result of cultivation than a 

 gift of nature. He writes in a style that is 

 at once crisp and incisive, easy and flowing. 

 His vocabulary is prolific, and every word is 

 the most felicitous for its place. There is 



no halting and no dissonance in the musical 

 rhythm of his periods, and there is not a 

 weak or a faltering sentence to be found be- 

 tween the covers of the book on " Physical 

 Education." He never spins out his pas- 

 sages, or plays with epithets for effect ; and 

 though the earnestness and ardor of ex- 

 pression often start the pulse, the strain of 

 eloquence never breaks into rhetorical in- 

 flation. These traits are possessed by our 

 author in a degree that places him, beyond 

 question, among the few unrivaled masters 

 of lucid idiomatic English. 



In an age when the whole force of cult- 

 ure is thrown upon the art of effective ex- 

 pression, it is no easy task to reach pre- 

 eminence in this field ; but the interest of 

 the case is heightened when we learn that 

 Dr. Oswald is not an Englishman, and is not 

 writing in his native speech, but in a foreign 

 tongue. Macaulay, in his life of Frederick 

 the Great, remarks, " Xo classic work, as 

 far as I recollect, was ever composed by 

 any man except in a dialect which he had 

 learned without remembering how and when, 

 and which he had spoken with perfect ease 

 before he had ever analyzed its structure." 

 The little book now before us will go far to 

 refute this dictum of the great essayist. At 

 any rate, we do not think the critic of the 

 " Troy Press " is far from the truth when 

 he declares that " Mr. Felix L. Oswald, of 

 Cincinnati, is the cleanest writer of pure 

 English on this continent." 



But, though proficient to a rare degree 

 in one of the most difficult arts, yet with 

 Dr. Oswald this art is far from being an end 

 in itself; he subordinates his gift of writing 

 to a more serious purpose. It is by the 

 breadth, beneficence, and vital urgency of 

 this controlling purpose that the man is to 

 be properly measured. With him the accom- 

 plishments of literary expression, like the 

 facts and truths of science, only acquire their 

 highest value as they are made tributary to 

 human amelioration. By " physical educa- 

 tion " he means not mere " gymnastics," as 

 hitherto interpreted, but all hygienic and 

 educative resources for the physical improve- 

 ment and redemption of mankind. Though 

 a man of many-sided culture, and a passion- 

 ate lover of nature, and therefore with in- 

 exhaustible resources for his own mental 

 gratification, yet Dr. Oswald is still more a 



