Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/484

468 Selection put aside, we have recourse only to exercise and régime. The desire to make an athlete of every one must, of necessity, be abandoned. The ideal human type varies with the times; now it is intellectual activity that is in dominant force, and it is not possible to bring muscular work and cerebral work to the front with equal vigor. Physiological knowledge on this subject is extensive enough for us to account for the fact. Cerebral labor is a considerable expenditure of energy, a source of nervous exhaustion quite comparable to the expenditure of energy that accompanies the production of mechanical labor in the muscles; whence we conceive that, beyond a certain amount of physical exercise regulated by hygiene, the total sum of the expenditure of nervous and muscular energy may become excessive and entirely debilitating. It is wisdom to abandon the constant practice of violent exercises; to take deliberate measures to restore athletic brutality would be a remedy worse than the disease. It would also be wise to leave uncalled-for and useless exercises to the circus people.

All exercise which, often repeated, tends to modify the external form and adapt the human organism to abnormal machines or movements, to eccentric attitudes, belongs to the domain of the acrobat, and is of no interest in view of general education. We thus arrive, by elimination, at the point of preserving as materials of the programmes of physical education the general measures which augment the productiveness of man considered as a source of mechanical work, on the condition that those measures do not deteriorate the human machine itself, and do not change the normal relations of that which it has been agreed to call the physical and the moral. Physical education, in short, ought to confirm health, give a harmonious development to the body, and teach how best to utilize the muscular force in the different applications which are demanded in life. We should also have regard to the necessities imposed by the social medium, and try to obtain results by intensive means, requiring little time and little space, and which address a large number at once.

To these three essentials of physical education—health, harmonious development, economical utilization of muscular force—correspond a series of exercises which can not produce their maximum useful effect without being subjected to regulations of which we proceed to sketch the principal features.

Health may be with equal ease confirmed or destroyed by exercise. It is only necessary to refer to the deplorable condition of the ancient athletes, with whom the enormous mass of the muscles absorbed all the activity of the organism. Health, therefore, does not depend on the size of the muscles nor on absolute muscular force. It is the harmony of the functions, and does not