Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 80.djvu/123

Rh exercise may be made useful and beneficial, instead of hurtful and dangerous as most of them are now. German sport is intended to remain an amateur sport; it is not to be a wild record breaking mania and struggle for money premiums, to satisfy the overwrought ambitious few; it is not to satisfy the curious wishing to see celebrated champions. The time-honored title of sportsman is to be denied to those who witness a tournament simply because they want to bet on the results. Professionals who are in it for what they can get out of it are not to be called sportsmen; the German sportsman is to remain a gentleman, active without being greedy for gain. The pleasure in tournaments, a national characteristic, is not to be discouraged, but it is not to be regarded as the highest aim of sport. A sentiment for out-of-door sport is to reach the entire nation; it is to bring the individual citizen from his office and workshop out under the influence of God's sunlit nature, to enable him to stretch his limbs and to fill his lungs with oxygen and his mind with the beauties of nature.

Manly virtue, endurance and resistance are to be placed above calcified arteries, enlargements of hearts and collapse. To this program the sport division of the exposition has remained true throughout.

The conventional attitude in fashionable society of displaying an unconscious ignorance with reference to everything concerning the structure and functions of the different organs of the human body is gradually losing the character of its traditional respectability. The forces at present operative in shaping the destinies of human races have rendered such a display of lack of knowledge culpable to a degree and its further cultivation a crime. The most formidable governing power in any free and enlightened country being.admittedly based upon a sound public opinion, itself a function of the degree of the general health of its citizens, it clearly becomes the duty of every individual to contribute to this constitutional asset of his commonwealth, in proportion to his personal intelligence and educational standing, as the most valued tax that can be levied on his citizenship, for it seems pretty well acknowledged that the future will belong to the nation possessing the greatest number of strong, healthy and physically as well as mentally resistant individuals.

As a contribution to the methodology of disseminating such knowledge among the people in the most effectual manner, the hall of popular hygiene at Dresden stands preeminent in recent times. Structure and functions of the human body were never before presented in a more easily assimilable form. The conditions necessary for the preservation of health and for the prevention of disease were never before set forth in so easily intelligible a manner. Neither expense nor pains had been