Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/23

Rh at a height of about four feet from the floor above a stratum of old quilts and carpets. In London, and in some of our Northeastern cities, health-lifts for children can now be got very cheap; weighted buckets, however, or sand-bags with strap-handles, will serve nearly the same purpose; and smaller bags of that kind may be used for various dumb-bell exercises. A plurality of young gymnasts can vary the programme by throwing such bags to each other and catching them with outstretched arms. In a suitable locality I would add a knotted rope, fastened to the ceiling by means of a screw-hook, and hanging down in a single or double chain, which children soon learn to climb by the hand-over-hand process, thus strengthening the triceps and flexor muscles, to whose development the quadrumana owe their peculiar arm-power. A full-grown man who has passed his life behind the counter will find it rather difficult to raise his body by the contraction of his arm-muscles, but, unless Darwin is right, Heaven must have intended us to pursue the culture of our higher virtues in the tree-tops, after the manner of the gymnosophists, for a young child acquires all climbing tricks with a quite amazing facility—much readier, in fact, than the art of biped progression, whose chief difficulty consists, perhaps, in the necessity of preserving the equilibrium. The knots should be far enough apart to tempt an enterprising climber to dispense with their use now and then and rely on the power of his grasp by seizing the rope at the interspaces; and this exercise should be especially encouraged, for the strength and suppleness of the wrist-joint will considerably facilitate the attainment of "polytechnic skill," as modern Jacks-of-all-trades begin to call their versatile handiness. Nay, the Rev. Salzmann holds that the ancient practice of hand-shaking was originally suggested by the wish to ascertain the wrist-power and consequent wrestling capacity of a stranger. As to the rest, negative precautions will generally suffice for the first three or four years. Diminish the danger of a fall by padding the floor of your nursery gymnasium, and the restless mobility of your pupils will generally save you the trouble of initiating them in the rudiments of hopping and tumbling. But make it a rule with all hired or amateur nursery maids that the children must not be carried more than is absolutely necessary.

In long winters it can do no harm, now and then, to let the youngsters turn the hall into a race-course; but, with the first warm weather, the arena should be removed to the next playground—a garden-lane, or a vacant lot without rubbish-heaps, if the Park Commissioners are too proscriptive. In its general invigorating effect on the organic system, running surpasses every other kind of exercise. Among the contests of the palæstra it ranked above wrestling and boxing; for more than two hundred years the Olympic games consisted, indeed, exclusively of foot-races, and the chronological era of Greece dated from the year when the Elean Corœbus defeated his Peloponnesian