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CHAP. XIII.] great advantage, but it ought to be used with due precautions.

Excess is the fashion of the day, and there is a very marked tendency to carry everything to extremes. In accordance with this, being once possessed of the idea that muscular exercise is beneficial, the majority firmly support the old but extremely fallacious proposition, that "You can't have too much of a good thing." For example, lawn-tennis is one of the best, safest, and most healthy games ever invented, but not a summer passes without my seeing a number of girls who have made themselves ill by playing it, simply because they insisted on playing all day and every day.

Men carry healthy games to equally unhealthy extremes, and many are the victims of over-addiction to cricket, boating, race-running, and football.

Sir William Gull once said, in his report on the physical health of the candidates for the Indian Civil Service: "The men who have been rejected have not failed through mere weakness of constitution, but (with only a solitary exception or two) from a mechanical defect in the valves of the heart in otherwise strong men, and for the most part traceable to over-muscular exercises."

Again, people unaccustomed to much exercise will perhaps make up their minds that a long walk will do them good; but unusual exertion will, in reality, do them harm. I have known young men who have led a sedentary life for months, perhaps preparing for an examination, begin the vacation