258 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



large classes of students in football, baseball and the like, and of the 

 over-strenuous combats waged among them, has been found in the sup- 

 posed advantage of athletics in storing up a fund of physical energy for 

 subsequent use. The line of reasoning has been the same as in connec- 

 tion with all phases of general culture; namely, that the discipline 

 given, the power acquired, may be applied to all possible physical func- 

 tions. In academic circles, this view of athletics, whether in the gym- 

 nasium or on the athletic field, has not even yet been very generally 

 questioned. While the popular mind, as reflected in the newspapers, 

 universally consoles itself for the bruises and broken bones of the 

 strenuous athletes, with the thought that there is fine discipline in all 

 this, and that the results in subsequent life will amply compensate for 

 present injuries. 



But here the accumulated observations and inductions of science 

 have begun to suggest troublesome questions about this more or less 

 artificial muscular development of boys and men. It has been observed 

 by physicians that very frequently athletic types of manhood have weak 

 hearts, weak lungs and weak vital organs generally. Often their health 

 and efficiency in later life are poor ; and, in not a few cases, they break 

 down prematurely. These observations have set both medical men and 

 teachers of physical culture to thinking, and we are now being told that 

 there is danger of over-developing the muscular system ; that over- 

 developed muscles impose a severe drain upon the rest of the organism ; 

 and that all muscular development, unless it is utilized, becomes a tax 

 upon bodily energ} r , and may give rise to disease. Only very recently a 

 naval officer, who was an athlete while in the naval academy, is reported 

 as having failed to meet the required tests of physical efficiency; and 

 his physician ascribes his failure to his earlier muscular development 

 in excess of the needs of his later life. That is to say, his vitality was 

 reduced through parasitic muscular culture. 



All this suggests that we can not store up a fund of physical energy 

 through specially devised forms of physical training. Indeed, the term 

 " general culture " as applied to the organic life is probably a mis- 

 nomer. The culture we get from gymnastic training and from the 

 athletic field is really special in character, and is applicable mainly, or 

 solely, to the types of physical activity that constitute the training. 

 Hence the energy derived from such culture does not become available 

 for the organism as a whole, but is limited to the special organs that 

 have been trained; and unless these organs continue to perform the 

 functions for which they were trained, they become useless and a detri- 

 ment to the life. Functionless physical structures derived through the 

 artificial exercises of any form of physical culture thus fall under the 

 general biological law of atrophy, with all its attendant consequences of 

 waste and disease. The only really economical form of physical culture, 



