136 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ica have been called, are not wholly blind to the causes of their degen- 

 eracy. " How dare you appeal to the God of battles ? " says Simon 

 Bolivar, in that famous protest against the endowment of convents, " if 

 you devote all your worship to a score of sickly saints ? " and in still 

 plainer language honest Boileau denounces the effeminacy of his coun- 

 trymen : " What has become of the image of God ! " he exclaims in his 

 second epistle ; " want of physical exercise and vicious indulgences, 

 what have they left of that form that once furnished the model for 

 Grecian statues ? We are a generation of cripples ! " 



Open-air exercise also bestows that beauty and that native grace in 

 which a New Zealand warrior is the superior of a cockney dandy. Not 

 only the North American red-skins but also those semi-barbarians whose 

 noble forms induced us to make them the representatives of the " Cau- 

 casian " tribes, the natives of Circassia and Daghestan, belong to the 

 Mongol or Turanian race, which originally was far inferior to our Aryan 

 ancestors. Under the influence of an effete civilization that same race 

 has, begot those Chinese caricatures of the Creator which are justly 

 despised even by Sambo Africanus, whose dark skin covers at least a 

 vigorous body. Old Montaigne already remarks that " the handsomest 

 man was a hunter and not a hair-dresser," and was by no means aston- 

 ished to find brighter eves and more faultless noses among the wood- 

 choppers of the Pyrenees than among the exquisites of a Parisian ball- 

 room. 



There was at least a theoretical consistency in the dogma of the 

 mediaeval monks who pretended to despise the pagan culture of the 

 manly powers and extolled self-torture, maceration, and abasement of 

 the body, as so many Christian virtues. We cannot doubt that they 

 reasoned from false premises ; but are there not still millions of their 

 spiritual progeny who persist in the belief that the Creator approves 

 the marring of his image, and that " a sickly, whining wretch, who 

 fears to walk upright or raise his eyes, lest the Deity might be offended 

 at his want of humble contrition " is a more pleasing sight in the eyes 

 of God than a man like Milo, who walked earth incessu invicti, " with 

 the gait of one who has not known defeat," and did not think it neces- 

 sary to ruin his body in order to save his soul ? "A good creed to die 

 by," that monstrous belief is often called, just as if the sun had been 

 created for the sake of the twilight ; but it is a curious circumstance 

 that on the eve of the long night the eyes of many of these world- 

 despising ascetics have been opened to the significance of their mis- 

 take, and the consciousness of having wasted an irretrievable day can 

 hardly have made its close more cheerful. 



" I have sinned against my brother, the ass " (referring to his abused 

 body), were the last words of St. Francis of Assisi, when his self-inflicted 

 martyrdom at last brought on a haemorrhage from the lungs, which his 

 physician told him would prove fatal. 



Baron Oxenstiern, the Swedish chancellor, who was a stanch Prot- 



