Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/485

Rh exist without a certain daily expenditure of muscular labor. Many persons, it is true, enjoy perfect health without giving themselves methodically up to physical culture; but such persons are easily disturbed by departures from their regular course, or suffer fatigue disproportionate to the effect produced. They can not endure the causes of perturbation, while it is the power to endure that constitutes robust health. It is one of the great benefits of exercise and of régime that they give the organism the faculty of accommodation to the diversities of our activity and of the medium that surrounds us. From the hygienic point of view the introduction into our daily habits of exercise in the open air, in the form of various games and sports, can not be too highly commended; but all such exercises, if we wish to make them always efficacious and exempt from dangers, should be subjected to rule.

We can not prudently leave youth without direction to organize competitions, like the race, in which violent exercises figure; it is indispensable to be on guard against the excesses which unrestrained emulation and self-love induce. Without this, exercises, which are salutary when practiced with moderation, degenerate into overstrain of the most dangerous character. We have in this way to regret numerous grave accidents due to colds, troubles of the digestion and the circulation, falls and blows. Under these restrictions, exercise taken under the form of open air games presents a special attraction to all; it offers the best hygienic conditions; but, to constitute a physical education, it ought also to respond to the desiderata exposed above the harmonious development of the body and useful application. Further than this, this form of exercise offers in practice, especially in the large cities, difficulties which are often insurmountable, at least for the present. In public instruction, as now constituted, the problem of physical education is very complex; it involves finding means to exercise regularly every day a large number of pupils at once, in a narrow space and a short time. It is in this shape that the question has been put to the ministerial commission charged with revising the programme and the manual of school gymnastics. Every pupil must receive an equal portion of exercise, and often there is only one master to direct from forty to sixty subjects. Large plats of land are needed near the schools, and often they do not exist. To send the children away through narrow,streets crowded with vehicles takes much time, and is dangerous. With all this adjusted, large plats of ground are not enough; ample sheds are needed for open-air exercise. Our climate is not very mild, and if we depend upon the fair days for taking exercise we shall run a great risk of seeing the number of our meetings reduced to an insufficient minimum; for it is not