Page:The physical training of children (IA 39002011126464.med.yale.edu).pdf/310



336. What amusements do you recommend for a boy as being most beneficial to health?

Many games—such as rowing, skating, cricket, quoits, football, rackets, single-stick, bandy, bowls, skittles, and all gymnastic exercises. Such games bring the muscles into proper action, and thus cause them to be fully developed. They expand and strengthen the chest; they cause a due circulation of the blood, making it to bound merrily through the blood-vessels, and thus to diffuse health and happiness in its course. Another excellent amusement for boys is the brandishing of clubs. They ought to be made in the form of a constable's staff, but should be much larger and heavier. The manner of handling them is so graphically described by Addison that I cannot do better than transcribe it: "When I was some years younger than I am at present, I used to employ myself in a more laborious diversion, which I learned from a Latin treatise of exercises that is written with great erudition; it is there called the [Greek: skiomachia], or the fighting with a man's own shadow, and consists in the brandishing of two short sticks grasped in each hand, and loaded with plugs of lead at either end. This opens the chest, exercises the limbs, and gives a man all the pleasure of boxing without the blows. I could wish that several learned men would lay out that time which they employ in controversies and disputes about nothing, in this method of fighting with their own shadows. It might conduce very much to evaporate the spleen which makes them uneasy to the public as well as to themselves."

Another capital healthful game is single-stick, which makes a boy "to gain an upright and elastic carriage, and to learn the use of his limbs." Single-stick may be