Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 77.djvu/264

258 large classes of students in football, baseball and the like, and of the over-strenuous combats waged among them, has been found in the supposed advantage of athletics in storing up a fund of physical energy for subsequent use. The line of reasoning has been the same as in connection with all phases of general culture; namely, that the discipline given, the power acquired, may be applied to all possible physical functions. In academic circles, this view of athletics, whether in the gymnasium or on the athletic field, has not even yet been very generally questioned. While the popular mind, as reflected in the newspapers, universally consoles itself for the bruises and broken bones of the strenuous athletes, with the thought that there is fine discipline in all this, and that the results in subsequent life will amply compensate for present injuries.

But here the accumulated observations and inductions of science have begun to suggest troublesome questions about this more or less artificial muscular development of boys and men. It has been observed by physicians that very frequently athletic types of manhood have weak hearts, weak lungs and weak vital organs generally. Often their health and efficiency in later life are poor; and, in not a few cases, they break down prematurely. These observations have set both medical men and teachers of physical culture to thinking, and we are now being told that there is danger of over-developing the muscular system; that overdeveloped muscles impose a severe drain upon the rest of the organism; and that all muscular development, unless it is utilized, becomes a tax upon bodily energy, and may give rise to disease. Only very recently a naval officer, who was an athlete while in the naval academy, is reported as having failed to meet the required tests of physical efficiency; and his physician ascribes his failure to his earlier muscular development in excess of the needs of his later life. That is to say, his vitality was reduced through parasitic muscular culture.

All this suggests that we can not store up a fund of physical energy through specially devised forms of physical training. Indeed, the term "general culture" as applied to the organic life is probably a misnomer. The culture we get from gymnastic training and from the athletic field is really special in character, and is applicable mainly, or solely, to the types of physical activity that constitute the training. Hence the energy derived from such culture does not become available for the organism as a whole, but is limited to the special organs that have been trained; and unless these organs continue to perform the functions for which they were trained, they become useless and a detriment to the life. Functionless physical structures derived through the artificial exercises of any form of physical culture thus fall under the general biological law of atrophy, with all its attendant consequences of waste and disease. The only really economical form of physical culture,