Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/514

498 swimming, rowing, skating, bowling, hand-ball, and general gymnastics, are the exercises best adapted to girls, and, for that matter, to any persons who wish a healthful and well-balanced rather than an abnormal physical development.

(The harmful and disfiguring accidents which often result from the rougher games practiced by young men, as well as the graver injuries which are the direct result of heavy lifting or a sudden severe strain upon certain sets of muscles, are matters to be deprecated, not emulated, and perfect physical training does not require such sacrifices.)

Where the girl has been allowed to grow to early womanhood neglectful of the requirements for proper physical culture, the question of what she may then undertake is a more serious one. If she be in college, the college physician should ascertain if there are any organic defects, and, if any exist, regulate her exercise in accordance with the requirements of the case. In nearly all cases, if the work is begun carefully, increased gradually, and sustained systematically, the best results will follow.

Let the girl be properly reared, and it will be found that Nature has imposed no obstacles against the attainment of the most healthful and highest physical standards which are commensurate with the normal development of the system.



HE field experiment is both the oldest, the most common, and the most popular form of agricultural experiment. So soon as agriculture passed beyond the rudest and most primitive stages, the idea of testing the value of different manures, or of different modes of culture and treatment, or of divers kinds or varieties of plants by means of comparative trials on adjacent plots of ground, must have suggested itself, and so the agricultural field experiment was initiated. In its beginning it must have been of the rudest character, and yet the fundamental idea was essentially scientific, viz., to place the things to be compared under the same conditions, and let each bring forth its results; and while the details of such experiments have been gradually refined, and errors of method eliminated, they are still the same in purpose and essence.

Such experiments appeal powerfully to popular interest; and the reasons for this are not difficult to perceive. Field trials deal with subjects of constant and absorbing interest to the farmer in a way readily comprehended; they employ processes with which he is familiar through daily use of them; above all, they seem to promise results