Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 21.djvu/468

454  the other! We hear two men discourse—the one with elegance, precision, style, the other with hesitation, blundering, rudeness. We say, how accomplished the one, how uncouth the other! In all these cases, muscular force has played its equal part with mental aptitude, or inaptitude. We see a man who has not been educated to grace of manner, or speech, or thought, assuming the part of a man of grace, manner, and thought, and, by much study, sustaining the character for a short time, as on the stage. But we know that man only acts; he is not trained to the muscular skill that can carry him through all parts of life with equal grace, though he may, by intense labor, attain a minor part, and be perfect in it.

We know that no one who late in life enters a vocation requiring certain qualities, like that of a physician, a surgeon, a preacher or pleader, a commander, a pilot, an engineer, a player, can gain that full self-possession which comes, as it is said, naturally, to the man who has been from early life trained in the work. Here again the failure we affirm is muscular as much as mental. The concealed muscular mechanism is not in working order. The mind may issue its commands, but, if the muscles fail to obey, the mind, like a general whose red-coats are undrilled and impervious, may break itself to imbecility and produce no results beyond hopeless and helpless confusion and dismay.

So we contend for the physical education of all our young, on the lines I have laid down, as the stirring want in this stirring time. Our intention is to make this nation a nation of heroes as well as scholars; a nation that the sculptor can describe as well as the historian; a nation that can hold its own in the scale of vitality, and protect its own by the virtues of courage, physical prowess, and endurance, as ably as by statesmanship and knowledge, more ably than by expediency and craft.



N the construction of a building in which large numbers of people are to be gathered together to listen to music or speaking, it is highly important to consider the conditions which shall best allow the sound to be carried from the musician or speaker to all of the hearers. It is the aim of the present article to place before the reader an outline of the art of so constructing buildings, and to present certain general principles upon which acoustic success depends.

The subject divides itself naturally into three parts. In the first is considered the effect of the condition of the air within an auditorium 