have been made to embody their sentiments in working institutions, that should mould the rising manhood and womanhood of the age. Rousseau says: "The body must be healthy to obey the soul: a good servant must be strong: the weaker the body, the more it encumbers and weakens the soul." He also He also says: "If you wish to develop the mind of a pupil, develop the power which that mind has to govern, exercise his body, make him healthy and strong, that you may make him prudent and reasonable." He makes the exceedingly important observation, that "all sensual passions are found in effeminate bodies; the more they are roused, the less they are satisfied." "The body and mind," is the aphorism of Sterne, "are like a jerkin and its lining. If you rumple the one, you rumple the other." Addison remarks, that "Gymnastics open the chest, exercise the limbs, and give a man all the pleasure of boxing, without the blows. I could wish," he adds, "that several learned men would lay out that time which they employ in controversies and disputes about nothing, in this method of fighting with their own shadows. It might conduce very much to evaporate the spleen which makes them uneasy to the public as well as to themselves." Montaigne puts the case thus: "It is a soul, not a body only, which we must educate; it is a man of whom we must not make two; we must not train the one without the other, but must guide and lead them like a pair of horses harnessed to one shaft." Hufeland advises to "let the child, till the seventh year, pass the greater part of the time in bodily movements and gymnastic games of every kind, and mostly in the open air, for that is most healthy." Frederic Hoffman says,. that "strong bodily exercise is often a real and uninjurious preventive of the beginning of many diseases." Rothstein remarks, that "we employ a scientific horseman to train a valuable horse, but let the development of the human body go." To come home to American writers, Cleveland, in his excellent Essay on the Classical Education of Boys, says:—

"First of all, I would recommend those exercises which strengthen the frame systematically, as gymnastics of every kind. I am aware that these are in use among us, but they are rarely insisted on as a duty; children are left to their inclination, and this is a country where VOL. LXXXI. NO. 168.

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the excessive heat in summer, and cold in winter, induce to want of energy, and inactivity. I wish that an hour a day might be set apart and rigidly kept for these exercises. The results of such an education are truly astonishing. . . . . It is melancholy indeed, in our institutions for learning, especially our colleges, to see so many puny-looking young men; hollow chests, round shoulders, and bending body are characteristics of our students, and premature old age or consumption carries off but too many of our most gifted men."

Horace Mann has the following passage, in a description of a gymnastic hall in Boston:—

"It is a pleasure to look upon this scene when the room is well filled, the apparatus in full use, and the gymnasts passing round from one piece of the apparatus to another, to give the requisite variety to their exercises, and to allow each different part of the body to take its turn. It is not the vigor, the agility, or the quickness; it is not the length of the leap, nor the height of the vaulting, which alone delights us in contemplating this scene. To a reflecting mind there is a deeper pleasure than could be derived from beholding any mere exhibition of strength, though it should equal Samson's, or of fleetness, though it should emulate that of Mercury. We know that every leap and spring aids in renewing the substance of the body, and therefore in giving greater hilarity to the spirits, and superior vigor to the intellect. Every motion helps to construct a fortification against disease, and to render the body more impregnable against its attacks. It requires indeed no very strong imagination to see the horrid forms of the diseases themselves, as they are exorcised and driven from the bodies, which were once their victims, and are compelled to seek some new tenement. Those prodigious leaps over the vaulting horse, how they kick hereditary gout out of the toes! Those swift somersets, with their quick and deep breathings, are ejecting bronchitis, asthma, and phthisic from the throat and lungs. On yonder pendant rope, consumption is hung up like a malefactor, as it is. Legions of blue devils are impaled on those parallel bars. Dyspepsia lost hold of its victim when he mounted the flying horse, and has never since been able to regain her accursed throne, and live by gnawing the vitals. There goes a flock of nervous distempers, headache and tic-douloureux and St. Anthony's fire; there they fly out of the window, seeking some stall-fed alderman, or fat millionnaire, or aristocratic old lady. Rheumatisms and cramps and spasms sit coiled up and chattering in the corners of the room, like Satanic imps, as they are; the strong muscles of the athletes having shaken them off, as the lion shakes the dew-drops from his

mane.

Jaundice flees away to yellow the cheeks and blear the eyes of my fair young lady, reclining on ottomans in her parlor. The balancing-pole shakes lumbago out of the back, and kinks out of the femoral muscles, and stitches out of the side. Pleurisy and apoplexy and fever and paralysis and death hover round; they look into the windows of this hall, but, finding brain and lungs and heart all defiant of their power, they go away in quest of some lazy cit, some guzzling drone, or some bloated epicure at his late supper, to fasten their fatal fangs upon them. In the mean time, the rose blooms again on the pale cheek of the gymnast; his shrivelled skin is filled out, and his non-elastic muscles and bones rejoice anew in the vigor and buoyancy of youth. A place like this ought to be named the Palace of Health."

But the theory of gymnastics, however scientific or plausible, has rarely been carried into full and patient execution in modern times. The Greek fire is extinct. In Denmark, as early as 1803, national attention was given to the gymnastic art, and many schools were established. In 1811, Dr. Jahn instituted his gymnasium at Berlin; in 1824, Mr. Völker founded one in London; and one was established in the same year by Captain Clias, at Chelsea, in the royal military asylum. In 1825, Dr. Beck, afterwards the honored Professor of Latin in Harvard College, a pupil of Dr. Jahn, commenced the first American gymnasium at Northampton, Massachusetts. The lamented Dr. Follen had charge of gymnasia in Boston and Cambridge in 1826 and 1827. Similar institutions now exist in most of the larger European and American cities.

But the most original and successful movement of this kind in modern times was made by Ling, who was born in Smaland, Sweden, November 15, 1766, and died May 3, 1839. His principle was, that "an harmonious organic development of the body, and of its powers and capacities, by exercises, considered in relation to the organic and intellectual faculties, ought to constitute an essential part in the general education of a people." His curative bodily movements were first employed in Stockholm, in 1813. His gymnastics were introduced many years ago, not only into all the military academies of Sweden, but into all schools, colleges, and universities, even into the orphan institutions and village schools.

"Sweden," says an authoress, "will never be able to acknowledge all it owes to the great art of Ling." This system has enjoyed the official support of the government for forty years, and has also been introduced into Russia by the proper authorities. The Prussian government delegated a physician to inquire into its merits, and, in consequence of his favorable report, a central model institution has been established at Berlin. Similar gymnasia, embodying his principles, have been founded at Vienna, Stettin, and Dresden. The exercises in his system are generally conducted without apparatus, and are admirably adapted to hospitals, and to persons of enfeebled sedentary life, who might sink under the more violent exercises of ropes, weights, pulleys, masts, and parallel bars.

We have met with no system that is better suited to the wants of modern times than that of Mr. Langdon. It comprehends the essential requisites of adaptation, variety, safety, efficiency, portableness, cheapness, physiological fitness, and facility to be learned and practised by every sex, age, and calling. The great prejudice which lies against the art, as tending to produce coarseness of manners and a combative disposition, and to raise up a generation of prize-fighters and bullies, is entirely obviated; for the exercises are not of a warlike character, either offensive or defensive. A rod of six feet in length, and two clubs of moderate size, with handles, constitute the outlay of expense for apparatus. The difficulty of being obliged to resort to a distant gymnasium is avoided; for the exercises can be carried on at home, in a yard, or study, and practised by children at their odd moments of leisure, or by the student, merchant, or artist in the fragments of hours that fall between the changes of occupation, or the visits of friends. The movements reach and exercise every limb and function of the body, and strain no one part excessively, but give play, vivacity, circulation, and energy to every portion of the trunk and the extremities. They are fitted to prevent and cure disease, to develop a manly and vigorous frame, and to resist the natural tendency of city and sedentary life to deteriorate the race. They come within the means of the poor as well as the rich, and com

bine graceful pastime with their substantial offices in promoting energy and robust health. They do not endanger the invalid by tasks beyond his ability, or constrain the young to feats of emulation that expose them to a broken limb, a ruptured bloodvessel, or an incurable sprain. We should consider the introduction of such a system into faithful and habitual practice in our country as one of the most hopeful features in education, and as fitted to add twofold power to all the intellectual and moral means provided for the culture of children and youth. Besides, we should deem such a system a curative instrument of vast efficacy in the various hospitals, often more potent than all the pills and powders of the materia medica, or the remedial arts of the physician and the nurse.

Our schools, academies, and colleges, as at present conducted, are deficient in some of the most important instrumentalities for creating a sound mind in a sound body. Indeed, they are guilty of misdemeanors and high offences against the majesty of human nature, from which they can be exonerated in part only on the plea of ignorance. But in nature, as in the state, ignorance excuses no one, and hence we witness a large number of those who entered our seminaries of education with high hopes of improvement and usefulness returning erelong, it may be with the most brilliant honors and prizes of successful competition, but shattered in health, the hectic planted on the cheek, and dyspepsia or bronchitis fastened as a chronic habit upon the vital organs of life. Only one institution, and that unfortunately is a military one, can honestly boast of sending forth its alumni stronger and healthier than it received them, fully armed and equipped with better than shield and spear for life's great struggle, even with the panoply of a vigorous sheathing of muscles upon a rock-like groundwork of bone, operated by untrembling nerves and steadily beating pulse. But what a pale, cadaverous, and prematurely aged set of youths are assembled as graduating classes, even in our most venerated universities! O for a touch of the Olympic games, rather than this pallid effeminacy! O for a return to the simple Persian elements of telling the truth, and hurling the javelin, instead of the bloodless cheeks, and flesh

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