i8o THJ^ POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



she conducts tlie little navigator out into the open main of duty 

 where he will have to steer himself. 



I have tried to show that the moral training of children is not 

 beyond human powers. It has its strong supports in child- 

 nature, and these, where there are wisdom and method on the 

 ruler's side, will secure success. I have not said that the mother's 

 task is easy. So far from thinking this, I hold that a mother who 

 bravely faces the problem, neither abandoning the wayward will 

 to its own devices nor, hardly less weakly, handing over the task 

 of disciplining it to a paid substitute, and who by well-considered 

 and steadfast effort succeeds in approaching the perfection I 

 have hinted at, combining the wise ruler with the tender and 

 compassionate parent, is among the few members of our species 

 who are entitled to its reverence. 



THE ANATOMY OF SPEED SKATING. 



By E. TAIT McKENZIE. 



SPEED skating as a distinct branch of athletics is of recent 

 date, but as an art it is one of the oldest cultivated by the 

 vigorous nations of the temperate and frigid zones. 



Fitz Stephen, the historian of London, speaks of the sport as 

 taking place in the twelfth century, but the first mention in his- 

 tory occurs eighteen hundred years ago, in the Edda, where the 

 god Uller is represented as distinguished by beauty, arrows, and 

 skates. In 1662, Pepys enters this item in his diary under date 

 December 1st: "So to my Lord Sandwich's, to Mr. Moore, and 

 then over the Parke (where I first in my life, it being a great 

 frost, did see people sliding with their skeates, which is a very 

 pretty art)." 



When we consider the improvements that modern ingenuity 

 has added to skates and race tracks, and the modern methods of 

 training, we would expect marked reductions in the time taken to 

 cover the various distances. We have no means of comparing 

 speeds for distances under a mile, but if we can trust the time 

 taken by the watches of 1821 we may accept the fact that in Eng- 

 land a Lincolnshire man won one hundred guineas by skating a 

 mile within two seconds of three minutes. The present record is 

 only four or five seconds better (2"56, Johnson, January 7, 1894). 



At the beginning of the century (1801) two young women 

 skated thirty miles in two hours at Groningen ; and if we go into 

 the dangerous ground of "hearsay" we will find an account 

 of a father who crossed forty leagues one day to rescue his son 

 from danger, and of another who bet that he could cover three 



