390 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the former routine of prison life, mental development was still 

 going on ; six of the number had reached the first grade in school- 

 work, and two of the remaining five had every prospect of soon 

 doing so." 



Physical improvement was marked ; their skins had acquired 

 the softness and smoothness of childhood (several having had 

 some form of skin-disease), and their biceps muscles had become 

 worthy of the traditional blacksmith. Their former stooping 

 attitude, slow movements, and shuffling gait had given place to 

 an appearance of alertness and vigor ; their faces also had devel- 

 oped an expression of comparative brightness and intelligence. 

 In manual labor the advance was not so pronounced as in other 

 directions, though improvement in this department was marked ; 

 but the stride in mental and moral development was almost beyond 

 belief. Dr. Wey, in closing his account of this most interesting 

 test of a new method in prison discipline, says, "I regard my 

 experiment in physical culture as showing that something more 

 than mere brawn can be accomplished by muscular exercise, 

 properly directed." 



Inquiries extending over a period of forty years, made of about 

 three hundred members of the Cambridge and Oxford University 

 crews, instituted by Dr. Maclaren, director of the University Gym- 

 nasium at Oxford, have elicited facts which may be accepted as 

 experimental evidence of the value of physical training in a 

 class of cases in which the conditions of life are most favorable, 

 hence affording a test from which practically every element ex- 

 cept the purely muscular one is eliminated. The benefits expe- 

 rienced by the members of these crews are stated to be an increase 

 of stamina, of energy, enterprise, and executive power, and of for- 

 titude in endurance of trials, privations, and disappointments — " a 

 goodly list of benefits bearing on the mental and moral as con- 

 spicuously as on the physical side of the question," says Dr. Mac- 

 laren, "for, in the struggle for existence, failure is more likely 

 to result from inability to endure trials and disappointments than 

 from merely physical weakness — the statistics of suicide bearing 

 out this statement." * 



The testimony obtained from this source shows that the advan- 

 tages of physical training are not limited to the idiotic, the igno- 

 rant, and the criminal classes, the conditions of whose lives have 

 been especially unfavorable to a normal symmetrical develop- 

 ment, but that they belong alike to all ; and these widely different 

 experiments, considered together, are calculated to convince the 

 most skeptical mind of the soundness of the several foregoing 

 theses based on certain facts of the development and physiology 

 of the muscular and nervous systems, and on certain principles of 



* See Dr. Maclaren's work on training. 



