258 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
large classes of students in football, baseball and the like, and of the 
over-strenuous combats waged among them, has been found in the sup- 
posed advantage of athletics in storing up a fund of physical energy for 
subsequent use. The line of reasoning has been the same as in connec- 
tion with all phases of general culture; namely, that the discipline 
given, the power acquired, may be applied to all possible physical func- 
tions. In academic circles, this view of athletics, whether in the gym- 
nasium or on the athletic field, has not even yet been very generally 
questioned. While the popular mind, as reflected in the newspapers, 
universally consoles itself for the bruises and broken bones of the 
strenuous athletes, with the thought that there is fine discipline in all 
this, and that the results in subsequent life will amply compensate for 
present injuries. 
But here the accumulated observations and inductions of science 
have begun to suggest troublesome questions about this more or less 
artificial muscular development of boys and men. It has been observed 
by physicians that very frequently athletic types of manhood have weak 
hearts, weak lungs and weak vital organs generally. Often their health 
and efficiency in later life are poor; and, in not a few cases, they break 
down prematurely. These observations have set both medical men and 
teachers of physical culture to thinking, and we are now being told that 
there is danger of over-developing the muscular system ; that over- 
developed muscles impose a severe drain upon the rest of the organism ; 
and that all muscular development, unless it is utilized, becomes a tax 
upon bodily energy, and may give rise to disease. Only very recently a 
naval officer, who was an athlete while in the naval academy, is reported 
as having failed to meet the required tests of physical efficiency ; and 
his physician ascribes his failure to his earlier muscular development 
in excess of the needs of his later life. That is to say, his vitality was 
reduced through parasitic muscular culture. 
All this suggests that we can not store up a fund of physical energy 
through specially devised forms of physical training. Indeed, the term 
“ general culture” as applied to the organic life is probably a mis- 
nomer. The culture we get from gymnastic training and from the 
athletic field is really special in character, and is applicable mainly, or 
solely, to the types of physical activity that constitute the training. 
Hence the energy derived from such culture does not become available 
for the organism as a whole, but is limited to the special organs that 
have been trained; and unless these organs continue to perform the 
functions for which they were trained, they become useless and a detri- 
ment to the life. Functionless physical structures derived through the 
artificial exercises of any form of physical culture thus fall under the 
general biological law of atrophy, with all its attendant consequences of 
waste and disease. The only really economical form of physical culture, 
