Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 38.djvu/487

Rh of static efforts the body of the muscles becomes thicker and more salient beneath the skin; under the influence of extended movements, on the other hand, the fleshy substance preserves its length and assumes a relation with the amplitude of the movement.

The articular surfaces are also modified by the latter style of practice, and we see how persons who preferably cultivate exercises of suppleness and quickness present a finer and more elegant form than those who develop athletic force by static contractions. With a similar constitution to begin with, those who devote themselves to practice with weights, with carrying burdens, become more massive than those who practice movements of agility, like fencing and racing. The latter come near the type of the ancient gladiator, the former that of Hercules. Which of them do we consider the more handsome?

The idea of beauty is wholly relative, and varies with places and times. Artists make beauty to consist in certain proportions of the parts of the skeleton and in the harmony of the muscular development. We might, perhaps, be more definite by saying that to be handsome at rest and in motion the man ought to present the traits of health and moderate strength, and in addition to be in possession of his means of locomotion and of natural defense. This view of beauty originates in the consideration that there is a necessary relation between vigor, skill, agility, and the outer form of the body at rest and in motion. Thus defined, the type of beauty, in a given race or medium, is an ideal which we seek to revive by physical education. It follows that a man specially devoted to any one exercise can not be handsome. This may be said of all the professions that localize muscular work in a restricted region of the body. There are, however, some sports that have the advantage of exercising equally the upper and lower limbs; such, for example, as wrestling, French boxing, swimming, and canoeing with two oars and a sliding seat. A good gymnastics includes complete exercises, and incomplete or unsymmetrical exercises, under such a condition as that they shall correct one another, and that the work shall bear upon the lower and upper limbs. An intensive gymnastics well taught produces superb subjects. Swedes, Swiss, and Germans, selected from special schools of gymnastics, and the monitors of the school at Joinville le Pont, might rival the finest types of antiquity. These facts are, unhappily, exceptions; children come to our schools with hereditary blemishes and malformations which the sedentary condition, faulty attitudes, and ill-directed exercises only tend to augment.

If we would come near to the type which we have given ourselves as the ideal one, we must make a judicious choice in