Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/486

470 occasionally, but every day, that we ought to take our portion of exercise. Even putting aside the question of time, it is not hard to show that play-hours do not constitute a complete physical education.

There is exercise in play-hours, but there is not, properly speaking, training of the movements; there is no improvement of these movements in view of a useful effect. Each one does not get the portion of exercise to which he has a right. According to the general law, the strongest or most hardy are more benefited than the weaker ones, and the mean level does not rise. Games and sports are still what they have always been an elegant means, an agreeable form of exercise, the privilege of the easy class, the pleasure of the smallest number. They can not be extended into the working class which is most interested in them, because it is, unfortunately, often obliged to live in bad hygienic conditions.

Even while it is possible, by means of more perfect facilities for communication, to give the children in our schools more frequent excursions in the open air, such excursions will always be rare—once or twice a week at the most, in the large cities. We shall be obliged on other days to have recourse to the processes of a good gymnastics, mere artificial processes, but which have the advantage of being applicable everywhere, and of producing, in the hands of experienced masters, successful results—an artificial remedy in an artificial medium, if we will call it so, and if we can define precisely the boundary between the natural and the artificial.

Let us, nevertheless, use all our efforts to multiply the public places and shelters for the sole purpose of furnishing children and individuals of every class and every age with places designed for exercise in the open air.

The essential factor of physical education is voluntary motion. From the hygienic point of view it is important to have a sufficient amount of exercise to stimulate the combustion in the interior of the organism, and to facilitate the elimination of the wastes of incomplete combustion, which develop into real poisons. From the point of view of harmonious development, not the amount alone of exercise is to be considered, but the form or nature of the movement also; not the quantity, but the quality, too, of the movement is of importance.

Nothing is more malleable than bone and muscle. Trainers, under the influence of movements frequently repeated, transform, domestic species by the action of three great modifiers—selection, alimentation, and exercise; every subject devoted to a well-characterized special calling bears the marks of its calling in its structure. We know, in a general way, that under the