160 BENEDICT— THE INFLUENXE OF [February 4, 



did the college athletes, J.C.W. and B.F.D., and, indeed, with an 

 efficiency very little less than that of the first two. When we come 

 to the figures of Mr. Butler, we find that he was able by virtue of 

 his skill and strength to accomplish a very great deal more work 

 than any of the other men, but as a matter of fact, his efficiency 

 was not materially greater than that of the college athletes, or 

 indeed, the untrained men. So far as these two untrained men are 

 concerned, their training consisted in riding the bicycle ergometer 

 one half hour the first day and a half-hour increase for each suc- 

 ceeding day for six days prior to the test. Thus on the sixth day 

 they rode three hours at one stretch and the total training occupied 

 but 10.5 hours. This was done in an attempt to accustom the leg 

 muscles to the exercise before the experiment began, so that they 

 would not be sore when used in the subsequent experiment, so 

 while they did have a small amount of training, it was far from 

 the ordinary training a college athlete would pass through in pre- 

 paring for an intercollegiate contest. It is obvious that Mr. Butler 

 was able to accomplish an enormous amount of work by virtue of 

 his long experience and well-developed musculature, but it is indeed 

 astounding that his muscles had no greater efficiency than did those 

 of much less trained college athletes. 



It is very clear from these experiments that in order to produce 

 muscular work, there must be a very large by-production of energy 

 in the body. When we consider that a man at rest, sitting quietly, 

 requires 92 calories for his maintenance, and when we know, as we 

 do from other experiments, that the same man asleep would require 

 not far from 60 calories, we see that in Mr. Butler's case during a 

 severe muscular work period, there was a heat production in his 

 body amounting actually to 10 times that when he was asleep. 



In order to produce this heat in the body there must have been 

 combustion, vigorous combustion, combustion either of body sub- 

 stance, in case the subject did not have food enough, or combustion 

 of food material previously eaten. We have found as a result of a 

 large number of experiments that a man at rest, doing no visible 

 external muscular work, requires not far from 2,000 calories for 

 maintenance during twenty-four hours. You can see that in three 

 hours Mr. Butler produced nearly this amount when at severe mus- 



