Page:Macfadden's Fasting, Hydropathy and Exercise.djvu/163

Rh slightly larger than the arms, and that in our nearest zoological relatives the difference is next to nothing. But from the first to the end of the fourteenth year, when a boy may chance to be apprenticed to a handicraft, his legs get about ten times as many opportunities for development. At every step the muscles of the lower motive organs have to lift and move the weight of the body, while his hands are pocketed for future reference or swing idly to and fro. The result is a partial and unsymmetric tendency of growth. The stout pedestals of the organism support a rickety super-structure.

It should be the first object of gymnastics to counteract the consequences of that mistake, and a disposition to pulmonary disorders can thus often be nipped in the germ. Microbes are specially apt to fasten upon torpid and neglected parts of the organism. Like caterpillars scattered by a gale, they can be dislodged by a movement-cure, and, besides, arm-gymnastics help to correct the most frequent of all malformations: vis., a narrow chest.

Weak lungs must have been a rarely-heard-of complaint at a time when the rising generation of a whole continent was trained in spear-throwing.