Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/457

Rh ready forms of movement for every situation of the body. Put, for example, an English boy and a German boy on a road across which hurdles are thrown: the English boy will be sure to climb over somehow. According to the height of the impediment, the German boy jumps, or he climbs, props himself, and swings himself over.

Nothing prevents the German turner at pleasure carrying his more theoretical training into practical and immediately available forms of exercise, in which he, since he has learned to learn, speedily attains the skill which his natural ability permits to him; so we have been told that the gymnasiast soon does as well as the real-scholar in the laboratory.

After all this there can be no doubt that German turning, in its wise mingling of theory and practice, exhibits the happiest, yes, the most adequate solution of the great problem with which pedagogics has been busy since Rousseau—a truth which, after a short obscurity, is now hardly contested, but the physiological principle of which a few are beginning to understand.

I further remark that I do not class with German turning the so called order-exercises, which, over-estimated as preparatives to exercising, and a lazy-bench for inefficient teachers of turning, belong, in my opinion, to the Kindergarten.

Hardly any progress in the knowledge of the laws of exercise has been made since Milo of Croton's famous experiment with the calf. Yet we are indebted to the creator of psychophysics for the beginning of the inquiry which is here possible. Herr Fechner daily for two months raised and dropped a pair of nine-and-a-half-pound dumbbells conformably to the beat of a second-pendulum, from the hanging position of the hands to over his head, raised them and dropped them again, till fatigue compelled him to stop. The curves, the ordinates of which indicated the number of elevations daily, are instructive in a double respect. At first the exercise appeared to bear no fruit, then the results came out all at once; but they soon reached their limit. Volkmann had a similar experience in exercise of the senses. Herr Fechner's curves, in the second place, do not rise steadily, but in a serrated manner, according as weariness or increasing facility prevailed. These experiments might be made of useful application in the inspection of recruits for particular purposes.

Like individuals, so are whole peoples susceptible to exercise and of being-trained; and here also an originally higher talent often does not go so far as continuous practice. The hardy, tough, North-German stock resemble the unpromising land, conquered only by obstinate labor, which we till. The Prussian is the self-made man among the peoples, yet he has not made himself without some help sent him by a favoring destiny. He has been eminently made, trained, and exercised through the care of a series of chiefs, unique in the world's history, culminating in the Emperor William. The present memorial day