630 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Recreations and sports have the inestimable advantage of 

 being taken in the open air and being interesting to those who 

 take them two factors whose absence in any form of therapeutic 

 exercise is with difficulty atoned for. Athletics, though sharing 

 in these advantages, are not well adapted to most therapeutic pur- 

 poses, on account of their excesses, indefinite dosage, and lack of 

 variety, each contestant being a specialist in one or a few forms of 

 exercise. There remain for consideration the formal exercises of 

 drill of various kinds, gymnastics, Swedish exercises, including 

 passive and mechanical movements, and massage, which is else- 

 where treated of in this work. 



As the primary purpose of military, fire, and other drills is 

 not therapeutic, they are not well suited to the treatment of dis- 

 ease, though they share in the beneficial effects of systematic ex- 

 ercise. The manual of arms is not adapted to young children, 

 being too formal and too strenuous ; the writer has seen cases of 

 lateral curvature, knock-knees, nervousness, and debility in young 

 boys which had apparently been aggravated if not produced by 

 military drill. 



Modern gymnastics has been largely shaped with reference to 

 military purposes, and, while gymnastic exercises, if well selected 

 and proportioned, do promote muscular development and physical 

 grace and vigor, they are easily carried to an extreme, and in- 

 stances are not rare where they have broken down the constitu- 

 tion, instead of building it up. Feats of skill train the nerve cen- 

 ters more than the muscles, and once the trick is acquired, their 

 value as exercise is slight. Feats of strength often put an inju- 

 rious strain upon the organism, with no corresponding benefit. 

 The arm appears to be the object of all the exercises of modern 

 gymnastics (Legrange) ; breasting and other movements which 

 throw the suspension or support of the body upon the arms and 

 shoulders give them unsuitable work, and result in disproportion- 

 ate development of the muscles of the shoulder girdle, often asso- 

 ciated with a rounded back, and little or no increased power of 

 ventilation, since all such feats are performed with a chest fixed 

 and constricted by muscular effort. The gymnastics of the mod- 

 ern gymnasium are in marked contrast with the athletic exercises 

 of the Greeks, with whom the striving for physical perfection 

 amounted to a passion. Their exercises were running, wrestling, 

 boxing, fencing, and throwing the discus, taken in the open air, 

 without apparatus, and exercising the body throughout, and espe- 

 cially in the fundamental associated movements of the trunk and 

 limbs. The defects of ordinary gymnastics have been felt by 

 those interested in physical culture, and have been partly obviated 

 by the introduction of free movements, like running, jumping, and 

 wrestling, and partly by the use of resistance machines, usually 



