722 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



children." Here is always the difficulty — to get hold of the motives 

 which will influence men and women in such way that they may finally 

 bo possessed by the "love of symmetry in form " which has such "a 

 deep moral significance," You may preach the doctrine to children, 

 and your words will be like the idle wind. Even our young men and 

 our maidens will prefer snug-fitting garments and handsome raiment 

 covering a bad form, to the proportions of Apollo or the beauty of the 

 Venus of Milo not clothed in the fashions of the day. Many men and 

 women, staggering along under burdens of ill-health, self-imposed by 

 neglect of the simplest natural laws, will give your beautiful theory 

 small thought. They will pursue their phantoms of wealth and ambi- 

 tion, while they hug the delusion that they suffer by God's will in this 

 " vale of tears." They do suffer, and deservedly, but only because 

 they do not use their own wills to conform their conduct to His good- 

 will as revealed in the constitution of their own being. It is useless to 

 set forth to such people the truths of health, the glad tidings of deliv- 

 erance from many of their ailments by the natural remedies of air, ex- 

 ercise, and food. The doctrines of health have always been preached, 

 and men have not heeded. Let us begin, then, with children, and edu- 

 cate them to these high truths. But with children we have to use 

 authority or play upon motives. If we use authority merely, the idea 

 of harmonious development will become distasteful to them. They 

 will break away from authority and break with the theory at the first 

 opportunity of libert5^ Put them at what we elders call play, and 

 they often accomplish of their own free-will what we with difficulty 

 get out of them by force. Now I say that, by their various athletic 

 organizations, young men are doing this very thing for themselves 

 that children do in plaj'. They establish in the colleges a system of 

 training for their various sports which affects not only the members 

 of the higher institutions of learning, but which reaches almost every 

 young man in the land. To express the idea in Dr. Sargent's words, 

 "the college clubs look to the academies, the academies to the schools, 

 the schools to the homes and firesides, to furnish candidates for athletic 

 honors." Dr. Sargent proposes this as one of his objections to making 

 " excellence in achievement the primary object of athletic exercise." 

 But it is the reward which this same "excellence in achievement" re- 

 ceives that brings forward good material and stimulates an increasing 

 number of men to exercise, who would never think of doing so with- 

 out this stimulus. One is at a loss to understand how this fact should 

 account (as Dr. Sargent says it does account) for the " lack of active 

 interest in athletics." On the contrary, it is one of the principal causes 

 of that active interest ; it keeps young men in training, holds them to 

 regular, systematic exercise, in season and out of season, through an 

 important and critical period of their growth ; it sends them into the 

 gymnasium when the season forbids practice in the field ; it restrains 

 them from excesses, from smoking and drinking, and from late hours ; 



