THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



JUNE, 1878. 



THE AGE OF GYMNASTICS. 



By F. L. OSWALD, M. D. 



" "TTTHAT can we learn from the ancient Greeks ? " was the theme 



V V which the Florentine Art-School proposed to the competitors 

 for the De Rossi prize last year : the most suggestive theme, perhaps, 

 that could be recommended to the consideration of the nineteenth cen- 

 tury. 



"Neither in delicacy of execution nor in grandeur of conception can 

 we measure ourselves with the Greeks of the ante-Alexandrian era," 

 says UAbbate Pintore, " The Painter Priest," as the successful com- 

 petitor signs himself, " nor would it be easy to say in what they were 

 not our superiors." 



The latter question would, indeed, be difficult to answer, even if we 

 should extend its application, which the Painter Priest probably re- 

 stricts to art-matters; and the theory which ascribes our progress in 

 secular as well as in spiritual insight to the "revealed light" of our 

 religion can hardly be reconciled with the fact that, in the very branches 

 of knowledge which refer to the conduct of human life, our latest and 

 best ideas were anticipated by those Nature-taught heathens, while even 

 in the objective sciences our fancied superiority would be sadly reduced, 

 if we should subtract the chance discoveries and technical details which 

 are the cumulative bequest of all preceding generations. 



It does really suggest a general revision of our physical and meta- 

 physical standards, if we consider in how many senses of the word the 

 proudest progress of our latter-day civilization is but a return to the 

 standpoints which the pagan inhabitants of a Mediterranean peninsula 

 occupied twentv-four centuries ago. After an infinitude of political 

 experiments with absolute and most puissant monarchs, elective mon- 

 archs, constitutional monarchs, and figure-head monarchs, the most ad- 



VOL. XIII. 9 



