442 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Here we have the other extreme. The nar* k^oxqv practical peo- 

 ple rejects our physical exercises as too theoretical for its taste. The 

 English at least did not understand at all, when, in answer to the 

 question what sports we played at, an effort was made to explain our- 

 tool-gymnastics to them. 



When we undertake to judge, in the light of our view into the 

 nature of physical exercise, between these three forms, the German 

 turning, the Swedish movement, and the English sport, the utter 

 worthlessness of the second form for the bodily improvement of a 

 healthy youth manifests itself at once. We have found that physical 

 culture is not only exercise of the muscles, as it appears on a superficial 

 view to be, but is quite as much, yes, more, exercise of the gray sub- 

 stance of the central nerve-system. The physiological value of the 

 Swedish movement is expressed in the simple remark that it can 

 strengthen the muscles, but has not power to make composite move- 

 ments fluent. Now, in an extremely theoretical case, a physical train- 

 ing is thinkable, by which single muscles of a Caspar Hauser could be 

 cultivated by gymnastics to a lion-like strength without the victim of 

 such an experiment even learning to walk. The Swedish movement 

 is only good for the purposes of physicians, to keep up or restore 

 the efficiency of single groups of muscles. 



Turning our attention to the relative worth of the German turning 

 and the English sport, the latter evidently responds more than the 

 former to the demands arising out of our physiological anatomy. 

 Were the end masterhood in running, jumping, climbing ; in dancing, 

 fencing, riding ; in swimming, rowing, or skating then nothing could 

 be more advisable than to practice equally and directly the necessary 

 concatenations in the actions of the ganglion-cells, without pausing at 

 the not practically applicable preliminary and intermediate steps of 

 the German turning. 



The German turning, however, offers not only the advantage of 

 furnishing to any number of youth, of every age and condition, op- 

 portunity for exercise with the smallest amount of external prepara- 

 tions, and independent of often unattainable external conditions ; it 

 not only implies the moral earnestness of an effort that proposes self- 

 improvement without immediate practical advantage as an ideal aim, 

 wherein the superiority of the intellectual training sought in the Ger- 

 man gymnasium may also be discerned ; but, furthermore, the ingen- 

 ious selection of German exercises, approved and refined through a 

 long experience, results incontestably in a more equable perfecting of 

 the body than can be attained where, as in England, the individual, 

 following his own casually determined inclination, applies himself with 

 ambitious enthusiasm to rowing or riding, to ball-playing or mountain- 

 climbing. The youthful body, thoroughly trained after the German 

 method, enjoys the extraordinary advantage that, like a well-instructed 

 mathematician, it is provided with methods for every problem, with 



