Page:Personal beauty how to cultivate and preserve it in accordance with the laws of health (1870).djvu/34

 Very much has been said of late years of the value of well-regulated gymnastic exercise as a means of health, and it were difficult to say too much on that topic. But comparatively little has been done or said with reference to increasing the beauty of the form by such means. To be sure, there is the art called "Calisthenics," from two Greek words meaning beauty and strength, but its aim has been confined to the latter quality only. So it is with gymnastics in general. Yet it must be remembered that it is very unusual in man, and still more so in woman, to find the graceful form of perfect symmetry connected with uncommon muscular vigor, or even remarkable powers of endurance. This is a familiar fact to surgeons who examine recruits for the army and the naval service.

The old Greeks, from whom we have learned so much concerning beauty, knew this very well, and divided, therefore, their gymnastic exercises into three classes. The first was for training the soldiers to severe, protracted labor, where endurance was the quality required; the second was for the athletes, the participants in the Olympic, Isthmian, and Pythian games, who sought to combine power with activity; while the third class had as its object the development of harmonious proportion, the correction of defects in the figure, and the cure of vices of conformation. It is this third class of gymnastic exercises which is peculiarly suitable to girls and women, all the movements being