EXERCISE.

Evening Star, Issue 4300, 7 December 1876, Page 4

EXERCISE.

[From the Graphic.) That taking exercise in some shape or form, and that for its own healthgiving sake, is as indispensable to the closely-packed multitudes of our towns as even a supply of bread to eat or oxygen to breathe, is one of the many modern doctrines which from the venturesome theories of one generation have become the commonplaces of the next. But on the best form and manner of taking exercise opinion still has ■wider range. The river, the cricketfield, the running-path, the evening drill and volunteer march-out have each and all their ardent apologists. But amongst all the veteran gymnast is most profuse and daring in his promises. Others may talk of pleasant evening hours, of braced-up sinews, andmngs that respire evenly after the scorers have notched the fiftieth run. He alone addresses himself of choice to the pallid visage and the weakly growth with " Come to me, and I will make you strong, will increase by a tenth your ridiculously light weight, will turn the chest, which no recruiting sergeant in the height of a great war would dare to pass, into the 33-inch thorax of the grenadier, and add, in three months, a third at least to your small muscular force." Native British sports were a little abashed at times in the presence of this German or rather Swedish stranger. They, at the best, could only promise to keep already vigorous frames in health. There were calumniators even who averred they often took away as much, at least, as they had ever given ; that the training or hard work required for proficiency in them was a draft in ad-

vance upon the system against which there was no real set-oft. Medicine looked incredulously askance on an art which professed to do without drugs what all the drugs in the world would have been impotent to achieve. What, wonder, then, if iu the dull season a little notice in a French army report has attracted perhaps more attention than it was worth 1 For is the gymnast, too, a charlatan—his work of cure a mere Penelope's web, three months of wonders and then three months more in which, as the dynamometer reveals, the increased force acquired in the first period oozes away as fast, or nearly so, as it was gained? No doubt the secret of the yhole matter was that the French gymnast went too fast. The exaggerated rate of progress at the commencement points unmistakeably to overexertion ..leading in natural course of things to equivalent re-action. Yet pimilar errors of judgment can easily, we fear, be paralleled at Home. With fcill our love of exercise too many of us nave still the vaguest notion of the sort of exercise we really want. ' Quot homines tot ludi —no hard and fast line of profitable or profitless exercise for all can, we are sure, be possibly laid down. For two classes at least, for him who wins his bread by muscular exertion, and him—heretical as the assertion may appear to many—who .wins his by wear and tear of brain, exercise for exercise sake is always a superfluity, if not something worse. Each of these classes in its hour of leisure requires not exercise but amuse:ment— the one to relieve wearied muscles of a strain, the other to arrest jfor a space expenditure of nervous .force, and give to the system time to recover from exhaustion. It is simply burning the candle at both ends for the brain-worker under any pretext of expanding the chest and oxygenating the lungs to take a hard hour's work in the gymnasium, or pull against the current of the Thames. Open air by all means, as much oxygen as can be got without trouble, a gentle stroll it may be every day, but for the rest of the summer holidays, with perfect cessation for the wear and worry, absolute change of scene, and, after the first day or two, as much increasing exercise as falls well within the limits of fatigue, are all that the bvaiul worker really wants. There was some jest, but much more wisdom, in the old University M.D 's advice to students for honors:—"No stiff constitutionals of an afternoon, but stroll into the fields, and sit upon a gate." The reservoir of nervous foice has, after all, its limits. To build up brain and muscle side by side transcends, we may be sure, all earthly skill. Boyhood, again, at every stage has equally its own proper sports. Who but the veriest doctrinaire could ever have suggested, as did a member of the late Ministrv some few years back, that much time would be gained for Study if a daily hour in the gymnasium were to take the place of the play-fields and the river % Exercise in early youth must be no mechanical health-assuring process. It is, or should be, an education in itself. There are other capacities than speed and strength to be developed in the hundred games which childhood from immemorial ages has given its whole thought to originate or improve—quickness of eye or hand, presence of mind in risk and difficulty j aptitude to lead, and readiness to obey. No series of movements, however admirable, gone through in order under the eye of an instructor, can ever be an equivalent for things like these. No Waterloo, we may be sure, was ever won in the playground of a mere gymnasium. Those, too, who have means and leisure to carry on into early manhood the athletic sports of happy schooldays may easily find worse work for idle hours. Roughly speaking, indeed, the exercise is almost invariably the best which brings with it the greatest amount of pleasurable excitement.

But for a larger class, perhaps, than any of these three—for men employed in sedentary routine work all day aud pent in streets all the year—no better form of taking exercise can well be named than the ordered movements of the gymnasium. Our public parks, delightful as they are, are sadly narrow for games that require almost unlimited space for exercise and practice. The river in many cases is too far away, and at the best available for only half the year. Why should not public gymnasiums—popularenough here wherever they exist—be as numerous in our towns as in those of Switzerland and Germany? No doubt gymnastics, like all sports, have their dangers the greatest, perhaps, that of abandoning their healthier forms for the useless, expoits of the acrobat. It is quite conceivable that they may be overdone, though probably there is no kind of exercise in which power increases so surely and so rapidly with practice, or in which one so rarely meets with those cases of break-down which almost invariably await the oarsman or the runner who goes on racing after youth is past, none certainly which offers such special advantages at the critical season when the immature frame has just begun to " set," and Nature puts her finishing touches to the regions of the chest and heart. The gymnast, too, is above time or place, can do with ten minutes or two hours' exercise, can work alike in open air and covered hall, in perfectlyequipped gymnasiums, or on simple apparatus roughly run up at home. Of course, if he is impatient, if he tries '

to cram into three months the work of twelve, he must be prepared for some little disappointment. With a slower but surer rate of progress the gain, great as it seems when roughly stated, would in all probability have been permanent —could at least have been retained with but slight subsequent exertion. There are surely not many exercises so easily practised, of which half as much could legitimately be asserted.