Page:How to Get Strong (1899).pdf/200

 when practised steadily and with energy; are among the most rapid means known for increasing, not the strength of the calves alone, but their girth as well.

Try a summer of mountain-climbing. Look at the men who spend their lives at it. Notice the best stayers in the Alpine clubs; and almost invariably they are found to have large and powerful calves; especially where their knees are not bent much in stepping. In a personal sketch of Bendigo, the once celebrated British prize-fighter (afterwards a quiet Christian man), much stress was laid on the fact that his calves measured a clean sixteen inches about. Yet, to show that gentlemen are sometimes quite as strong in given directions as prize-fighters; look at Professor Maclaren's own memorandum of not only what a splendid pair of legs he himself had at the start; but what a little mountain-climbing did for them; for he says that in four months of Alpine walking; averaging nine hours a day; his calves went up from sixteen inches to seventeen and a quarter! and his thighs from twenty-three and a half inches to twenty-five. If instances nearer home are sought; and yet where neither anything like the time Maclaren took was given to it; nor any of the very severe work of the gentleman referred to a little earlier; look at what Dr. Sargent accomplished, not with one solitary man but with two hundred; not giving nine hours a day to it, but only "half an hour a day, four times a week, for a period of six months." In this very brief time, and by moderate exercises, he increased the average girth of the calf of these whole two hundred men from twelve and a half inches to thirteen and a quarter. There was one pupil, working four hours a week instead of four half-hours; and for one year instead of six months; who increased his