Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/456

442 Here we have the other extreme. The κατ' ὲζοχἠν practical people rejects our physical exercises as too theoretical for its taste. The English at least did not understand at all, when, in answer to the question what sports we played at, an effort was made to explain our tool-gymnastics to them.

When we undertake to judge, in the light of our view into the nature of physical exercise, between these three forms, the German turning, the Swedish movement, and the English sport, the utter worthlessness of the second form for the bodily improvement of a healthy youth manifests itself at once. We have found that physical culture is not only exercise of the muscles, as it appears on a superficial view to be, but is quite as much, yes, more, exercise of the gray substance of the central nerve-system. The physiological value of the Swedish movement is expressed in the simple remark that it can strengthen the muscles, but has not power to make composite movements fluent. Now, in an extremely theoretical case, a physical training is thinkable, by which single muscles of a Caspar Hauser could be cultivated by gymnastics to a lion-like strength without the victim of such an experiment even learning to walk. The Swedish movement is only good for the purposes of physicians, to keep up or restore the efficiency of single groups of muscles.

Turning our attention to the relative worth of the German turning and the English sport, the latter evidently responds more than the former to the demands arising out of our physiological anatomy. Were the end masterhood in running, jumping, climbing; in dancing, fencing, riding; in swimming, rowing, or skating—then nothing could be more advisable than to practice equally and directly the necessary concatenations in the actions of the ganglion-cells, without pausing at the not practically applicable preliminary and intermediate steps of the German turning.

The German turning, however, offers not only the advantage of furnishing to any number of youth, of every age and condition, opportunity for exercise with the smallest amount of external preparations, and independent of often unattainable external conditions; it not only implies the moral earnestness of an effort that proposes self-improvement without immediate practical advantage as an ideal aim, wherein the superiority of the intellectual training sought in the German gymnasium may also be discerned; but, furthermore, the ingenious selection of German exercises, approved and refined through a long experience, results incontestably in a more equable perfecting of the body than can be attained where, as in England, the individual, following his own casually determined inclination, applies himself with ambitious enthusiasm to rowing or riding, to ball-playing or mountain climbing. The youthful body, thoroughly trained after the German method, enjoys the extraordinary advantage that, like a well-instructed mathematician, it is provided with methods for every problem, with