OUR BODIES.

Mr. William Blaikie in a recent article on "Our Bodies" deplores the lack of thorough physical training throughout the schools and colleges of our country. The general athletics and the sports which occupy so many of the students of the colleges are engaged in by those who least need them. The amount of strength required to compete in any of the ordinary sports is far above that possessed by the average young man. In reply to the statement that some may benefit by manual labor he says : "Not one in fifty of our schoolboys and girls does a day's manual labor in the whole year round : indeed the majority of them never did one in their lives. They grow, but they do not develop. It has been argued that the system of athletics generally pursued makes those who practice it essentially prize-fighters, champion oarsmen, "wasting their time and devoting all their thoughts to some feat of athletic prowess." In rebuttal of this statement, Mr. Blaikie instances President Eliot and Professor Agassiz of Harvard and Dr. McCosh and Mr. Gladstone. "Yet the former two did excellent work in their university boat. Princeton's famous president, if our information is correct, rowed in the Dublin university crew, and the British prime minister can now, at seventy-three, probably cut down more trees in a day than any merchant, banker, or professional man of his age in the city of New York, yet finds time to grapple with the most intricate and difficult problems of a territory twice as vast as the whole United States.

Continuing the argument, the writer says "The results of this utter neglect of any sound system of physical education stand out in almost every city home in America. Not one boy in five is well built, or, unless he is fat, measures within an inch, often three inches, as much about the chest or thigh or upper arm, or weighs within ten pounds as much, as a well-proportioned, vigorous, properly developed boy of his age should do.

Scarcely one girl in three ventures to wear a jersey, mainly because she knows too well that this tell-tale jacket only becomes a good figure. Yet the difference in girth between the developed arm which graces a jersey and the undeveloped one which does not, in a girl of the same height and age, is seldom more than two inches, and often, even, than one, while the well-set chest outgirths the indifferent one by seldom over three inches. Among girls, running is a lost art. Yet it is doubtful if an exercise was ever devised which does more to beget grace and ease of movement.

Most girls have weak arms. If they doubt it, let them try with one hand to push up once high over their head a dumb-bell weighing a quarter or even a fifth of their own weight. Or with both hands catching hold of a bar or the rung of a ladder, as high up as they can reach, let them see if they can pull slowly up till the chin touches the hands. Yet a moderately strong man at dumb-bells will push up one weighing over half his own weight, and some men have managed to put up more than their own weight; and as to pulling up, a girl with developed arms can do it five or six times with comparative ease, and a boy with thoroughly good arms two or three times as many. Both the fore-arms and the upper arms of most girls are not so large by an inch as those of well-built girls of their height and age. Yet in any well-regulated gymnasium, we find youths adding in one year an inch, and even two inches, to the girth of each upper arm, and half as much to that of each fore-arm, while a gain of from three to five inches about the chest is nothing rare, and all this simply by less than an hour's daily work, yet which, besides expanding the lungs, called the various muscles of the arms, shoulders, chest and all the greater part of the body into vigorous play.

Professor Farrow, at West Point, Professor Andrews of the Gymnasium of the Young Men's Christian Association at Brooklyn, Dr. Sargent, of Hemenway Gymnasium at Harvard University, and Archabald Maclaren, of the Gymnasium at Oxford University in England, all find no difficulty in adding in one year from an inch to an inch and a half to the fore and upper arms, and three inches to the girth of chest, of pupils under their charge.