The sanitary influence of active exercise is so unmistakable that it has never been altogether disputed, though its importance is still strangely underrated.

   Nearly two thousand years ago the medical philosopher Asclepiades substituted gymnastics for drugs, and Dr. Boerhave repeatedly called attention to the remedial effect of outdoor labor in cases where medicine had failed to bring relief. "When I reflect on the pathological immunities of hard-working people," he says, "I cannot help thinking that most of our fashionable diseases might be cured mechanically, instead of chemically, by climbing a bitterwood tree, or chopping it down, if you like, rather than swallowing a decoction of its disgusting leaves."

   The organism of the human body has, indeed, been aptly compared to a vessel moved both by steam and sails, but still more closely resembles the ingenious motor-boat of a Belgian engineer who utilized air-currents to recharge the batteries of an electric propeller. In a calm the ship could for a while continue its course with the assistance of the stored-up power, but under the impulse of a good breeze the engines worked under high pressure, besides being aided by a number of sails. Even thus the activity of the internal organism can for a time dispense with the stimulus of well-directed exercise, but manifests the potency of its assistance with a promptness that precludes all reasonable doubt about the connection of cause and effect. Exposure to a blood-chilling atmosphere makes the generation of animal warmth a question of vital importance, and ten minutes of vigorous exercise will raise that warmth from twenty to thirty degrees. Picket-posts on the Manitoba frontier often keep themselves alive by running, instead of walking, up and clown, for half-hours or longer. Premier Gladstone's prescription of "a cord of beechwood a week, axe and wedges, in six instalments, before breakfast," will stimulate the appetite in a manner which no drugs can begin to approach.

   Walking up a hill of two hundred feet suffices to increase the pulse and relieve oppression of the chest and other premonitory symptoms of heart-disease. Sleeplessness can be cured, or rather palliated, by narcotics—for a while. The eventual effect of the drug is to aggravate the evil and induce those fifty-hour vigils that drove De Quincey to the verge of insanity. Outdoor exercise will remedy the trouble, not only more cheaply and reliably, but also without the risk of distressing after-effects.

   Skilful sailors can utilize any—not too violent—breeze, to keep their course in the desired direction, and there is hardly a form of active exercise that cannot be modified in a manner to obviate the necessity of the drug-monger's assistance, but, besides, there are movement-cure prescriptions of a more limited, but also more infallible efficacy, that may ultimately supersede the use of medicinal specifics.

   The principles of regeneration by natural hygiene may be summed up in Dr. Hufeland's advice, to "re-establish, as far as practicable, the conditions to which our organism became adapted during the infinite series of ages preceding the era of indoor-life and made-dishes." The human constitution—physical and moral—was never intended for the sloth of the domestic habits enforced by our sabbatharian civilization. Man's predecessors in the scale of organic evolution were the most restlessly active of all vertebrate animals. Our Darwinian cousins pass their life in the gymnasia of nature—the tree-tops of the tropical virgin-woods; their meals, courtships, and forays alternate with acrobatic exploits; they build no nests; except an occasional rain-shelter, and carry their young in their migrations from forest to forest.

   Almost equally active, and even more athletic, man-like creatures inhabited this planet for a period variously estimated from 25,000 to half a million years. Human skeletons have been found among the strata of former geological ages and associated with the bones of such prehistoric animals as mammoths and cave-bears. They were tree-climbers and tree-food eaters, at first, those semi-human progenitors of ours, and in their encounters with the giant-cats of the tropics developed that dread of darkness and night-hags still haunting our mental condition, with all its instinctive love of forest-life. Venturing further and further from their equatorial birthlands, our primitive ancestors became hunters; then nomadic herders, and finally stock-farmers, trying their luck with various methods of agriculture.

   During that infinite series of generations the beings that evolved our organism may have strayed into strange forms of idolatry and refuted the belief in the universality of moral institutions; but they certainly did not fail to worship the goddess of health in her own temples. They were runners, swimmers, leapers, hill-climbers, wrestlers, boxers, and spearmen; outdoor exercise yielded them both the means of life and the opportunities for recreation. And it would be a mistake to suppose that the brief era of indoor life had modified our physical constitution in any essential respect. Rivers run most easily in their ancient channels. Remedy-mongers have tried the effect of concentrated food—pure fat, sugar, albumen, and so forth, but it was found that the human stomach preferred more concrete substances. "Whole-wheat bread." with all its innutritive admixtures, is more digestible than pure starch.

   Chemically the reason why is not quite clear, but we may suspect that it has a good deal to do with habits formed during the long ages preceding the advent of Liebig's food extracts.

   And Nature declines to ratify the contract of kid-gloved brain-workers with the inventors of labor-saving machinery. Intellectual development, to be sure, is the quintescence of all that distinguishes man from his brute fellow-creatures; but beings of our species cannot thrive on metaphysics alone, any more than on Dr. Bernard's Elixir of Life. To avoid dyspepsia, insomnia, hemorrhoids, and sick headaches the Trismegistus of Science has now and then to descend from his study and exercise his motive muscles in the playgrounds of the hirsute anthropoids. Dr. Boerhave's remark that we ought to substitute mechanical for chemical remedies has been paraphrased in the apothegm that "patients might walk away from a good many diseases." Pedestrianism is, indeed, the readiest of all forms of active exercise—doubly effective to burden-carriers, though a health-seeker need not take up his whole bed to walk. A stout overcoat in winter and a market-basket in summer are enough to outweigh the influence of habit which in the course of years might otherwise modify the efficiency of the prescription. An old physician of my acquaintance often repeats his assertion that the best advice a doctor could give to a friend (as distinct from a fee-paying patient) would be to choose his dwelling on some out-of-the-way hill-top, or similar location, at a safe distance from the temptation of the street-car lines, and to readopt the good old democratic habit of doing his own shopping.

   "Where street-cars reach," he says, "there will be always a pretext for using them, in spite of solemn pledges to the contrary. It will be storms in winter and heat in summer, or special hurry, where meteorological excuses fail. But in the form of Hobson's choice an excellent movement-cure remedy will get a chance to prove itsefficacy. The walking-habit may ruin a dozen extra pair of shoes per year, and the random shopper is apt to fare worse than the patron of a grocery-wagon; but he is sure to bring home a cargo of health."

   A keen appetite for supper, for instance, and a fair chance for a good night's rest. The effect of pedestrianism as a specific for the cure of insomnia can be tested by the simple plan of an occasional intermission. A stay-at-home day being pretty sure to be followed by twice the usual number of sleepless hours.

   The organs of the human body are weakened by disuse and invigorated by active service; unexercised muscles become flabby, teeth decay upon a diet of pap; our very hair dies and drops like dead leaves if the constant wearing of hats and night-caps makes it superfluous. And to a quite unsuspected degree the same holds good of our respiratory organs. Exercise that makes the lungs work to the limit of their capacity tends to gradually enlarge that limit. Consumptives not too far advanced toward the stage of total collapse may purchase a new lease of life by exercise stimulating the action of the torpid lungs. A few years ago an emaciated Canadian miner came South for his health and located a small placer claim on the plateau of "Fort Mountain" in Murray County, Georgia. The mountain is a mile high—a cloud-capped outpost of the Southern Alleghanies, and the up-trip, with a few dozen eggs from the next valley farm, obliged the miner to stop every few minutes to keep his chest from bursting; but before the end of the year he was able to make the same trip, without a stop, with a bushel-bag full of cornmeal. The waste from the ravages of the tubercle microbes can perhaps never be repaired but the healthy tissue of the remaining portion of the lung is susceptible both of expansion and invigoration. The lungs expand and contract with the chest.

   If three sisters marry on the same day—the first a ferryman, and learns to row a boat; the second a tailor and takes to tight lacing; the third a grocer and tends his shop, an autopsy would show that in twenty years after their separation the ferrywoman's lungs have grown fifty per cent. larger than the shopkeeper's and fully twice as large as the dressmaker's.

   "Health is the chief of all earthly blessings," Lord Chesterfield writes to his son;" so much so, indeed, that a healthy beggar is happier than a bedridden king; and the only way in which a rich man can avoid the forfeiture of his birthright to happiness is to live as frugally and laboriously as if he were poor."

   Still, strenuous exercise may to a considerable degree atone for dietetic indulgences, and few observers of men and habits can fail to have noticed Epicureans whom a sort of instinct prompts to give themselves the benefit of a movement-cure—stout, florid gormands who decline to become torpid, and walk habitually at a double-quick or go out of their w\ay to join in athletic sports. The net result in happiness may not get them above the average by that method; but they keep disease at bay:

"Lass nach Riesen-Kraft ihn streben,
Wer im Uebermass geniesst;
Dem Athleten wird vergeben,
Was der Schwachling treuer busst."

"He would enjoy himself to an excessive degree should likewise try to exceed in vigor; an athlete may take risks that might prove fatal to a weakling."

   A considerable help to such endeavors in muscular Christianity is the possession of a little real estate, an orchard or patch of truck-farm, that can be worked for a practical purpose and with visible results. Uncle Toby, in digging up his brother's kitchen-garden to illustrate the Vauban system of ramparts, incidentally also erected fortifications against the inroads of decrepitude, and it has been repeatedly observed that individuals who attained to an extreme old age were generally (like Jenkins, Darapsky, and Thomas Parr) poor rustics whose avocations required daily labor in the fields and woods. The German foresters, or wardens of government woodlands, are likewise longlived, with the noteworthy exception of aristocrats who enter a Forst-schule (College of Forestry) in reliance on family influence and rapid promotion, and really most of them contrive to get hold of a sinecure, enabling them to earn a high salary by a few hours of office-work, or retire on a liberal pension. But their lease of life is equally limited, while the poor Revier Foerster who has to plant some threescore saplings every week-day, has a first-class chance to continue his ministrations for as many years.

   For the same reason school-trustees should strain the limits of their tolerance, rather than discourage the passion for out-door sports that distinguishes the youngsters of the progressive nations from the whelps of decadence. Football, baseball, aquatic sports, and the "Hare and Hound "races of the British colleges, serve a purpose of moral as well as physical sanitation, for some of the besetting vices of youth are symptoms of abnormal physical inactivity—effects, in fact, as often as causes of disease.

   No clamor for outing-sports interfere with the curriculum of South-European colleges, and that fact is far more ominous than the alleged tendency to rowdyism that alarms old women of both sexes in our Northern university towns. The civilization of Greece and Moorish Spain sprang from barbarism like water from the rock in the desert of Sinai, while physical indolence is the torpor that precedes the collapse of moribund nations, and heralds a moral night that knows no morning.

   In latitudes of an inhospitable climate an opportunity for indoor exercise has indisputable advantages, but involves the risk of defective ventilation, and the ideal of a rainday refuge for votaries of the movement-cure is the drill-shed of an Austrian household regiment: A structure 300 feet long by 60 broad, and about 25 feet between the floor and the ceiling of the main hall, yet equipped with hot-air pipes sufficient to counteract the frosts of the coldest winter day.

   A time may come when every country town of the civilized North-lands will have a public gymnasium of that sort, and in the meanwhile in door-workers must contrive to defy the main obstacle to effective ventilation, viz., the superstitious dread of cold draughts.

   The supposed connection of catarrhs ("colds") with currents of cold air is strikingly refuted by the practical argument of an open smithy. Blacksmith—as well as the operatives of Northern rolling-mills—often work all day long in close proximity to a blazing fire, while a wide-open door admits the blizzards of the midwinter season; yes their health and longevity is far above the average and might rank with that of gardeners, if they were not obliged to inhale coal-fumes, as well as ice-winds. Their special work, it is true, tends to counteract the effects of the one-sided system of exercise that explains the shortcomings of nine out of ten health-seekers. "Our patients get an immense deal of encouragement to develop the muscles of their motive organs," \\ritcs the visitor of a climatic sanitarium;" there are mountain-excursions and forest-excursions, five times a week, and every evening troops of volunteers clamber up a prospect rock to see the sunset and get an appetite for supper. Besides, there is a Kneipp-cure department, and the trots through the wet meadow often take the form of a foot-race. But what are our arms doing all that while? Lifting a half-ounce spoon from plate to mouth or reaching up to take a hat from the rack."

   It would be no exaggeration to say that the legs of the average city dweller get a thousand times as much exercise as his arms.

   Amateur-blacksmithing, on the Elihu Burritt plan, remedies that disproportion, and the "Learned Blacksmith" went so far as to recommend it as a mental and moral remedy. He learned to speak four different languages and had a book acquaintance with half a dozen more, including Hebrew and Greek. Memorizing a hundred words an hour was about the average of his linguistic tasks, up to his fiftieth year, and he was firmly persuaded that sledge-hammer matinee helped to counterbalance the deadweight of such burdens. And, moreover, he considered a visit to his smithy a ready expedient in ethical emergencies. If anything happened to rouse his indignation he would skip downstair and hammer away like Thor and Vulcan for a minute or two, then draw a deep breath and feel that the rising choler had been successfully "worked off." "What else would you propose?" he inquires; "sit still and swallow your wrath, to imitate the saints? Well, try it, and see if the suppressed gall doesn't surge back a dozen times before night, making you as cross as an old spinster with no moral outlet but her scandalous tongue."

   Sledge-hammering also helps to invigorate the lungs and shake the diaphragm in a manner pretty sure to dislodge the lurking imps of dyspepsia. Violent movement-cures may not be advisable in the far-gone stages of debilitating disorders, but, on the whole, will do for a crapulent organism what a brisk gale does for the forests of a tropical coast-swamp that may vegetate in a calm, but cannot get rid of their dead leaves and mouldering branches. Microbes have a predilection for a quiet boarding-house and do not often frequent a blacksmith's body.

   Woodchopping answers the same purpose, and in a climate like that of our lake-shore States it would be worth while to weather-tighten and warm a shed, in order to try Mr. Gladstone's favorite prescription without the risk of frozen toes. The "Sage of Hawarclen" worked in the open air, but the winter-climate of Southern Britain, under the parallel of Montreal, is in reality milder than that of Maryland. Wood-choppers indulging the luxury of a weather-proof building—heated, perhaps, with a chip-fire flickering in an open fireplace, can now and then give their lungs the benefit of a draught of purer oxygen by stepping out in the storm and fetching additional logs from the wood-pile.

   Asthma-patients, with a little experience in the caprices of their mysterious disorder, will not be apt to protract that special test of strength beyond the first premonitions of fatigue. Burden-carrying is always liable to bring on a spasmodic fit of an affection that cannot be provoked by other forms of exercise, even in preposterous overdoses. A bicyclist may work his pedals till his spine is twisted by cramps and his fingers threaten to relax their grip; his lungs may heave and gasp without betraying any other symptoms of distress, a pedestrian may trudge along till his knee-joints stagger and sleep tries to enforce its rights in the middle of the track, but no trace of asthma, while a shouldered weight of perhaps less than a hundred pounds suddenly "cuts the breath," as if the valves of the respiratory apparatus had closed with a snap. "Dyspnoea," or air-famine, pathologists call a paroxysm of that sort, and the difficulty in drawing a full breath may yield to a cold sponge-bath or defy all remedies and keep the patient in misery for weeks together.

   Light indoor work: amateur carpentering, house-cleaning, adjusting stove-pipes or library shelves, is, on the other hand, the most efficient of all asthma-cures, and far more permanent in its effects than the chemical specifics (stramonium smoke, etc.) that relieve the spasm for a few minutes without preventing the risk of a speedy relapse. And it is a curious and almost unaccountable fact that smoke, dust, and other impurities of the indoor atmosphere, rather enhance the effectiveness of the prescription for that special purpose. The most plausible guess at the rationale of that experience is the conjecture that the aforesaid admixtures of the indoor air oblige the lungs to effect the \\ork of expulsion by opening some gate which incidentally relieves the spasm of the asthma-fit. Always provided that the remedy is applied only at long intervals and in moderate doses. An excess of dust, breathed day after day, clogs the tissue of the lungs to an irremediable degree, and millers are notoriously subject to chronic asthma in its most incurable. if not most distressing, forms.

   The poet-philosopher Goethe remarks that every brain-worker should consult his sanitary interests by following some mechanical trade as a by-occupation, and the successor of Frederic the Great made that advice a pretext for establishing the rule that every prince of the House of Prussia must serve an apprenticeship at some handicraft. Some of the uniformed youngsters accordingly learn printing, others bookbinding, but about four out of five prefer a curriculum in a carpenter's shop. A hundred years ago the Berlin wits used to hint that the by-law in question might prove useful under circumstances that obliged a good many refugees from neighboring France to try their hands at the unaccustomed occupation of useful work, but the rule is still in force, and none of the royal blue-coats have been the worse for the investiture of a carpenter's apron. Joiner's work: sawing, jack-planing, and hammering exercises nearly every muscle of the human body, and has the incidental advantage of a pastime that grows on the habit and can become a passion, like gardening and watchmaking.

   And not all "exercise with a useful by-purpose" can be recommended from that point of view. There are some extremely utilitarian occupations that lack the spice of variety and a personal interest. In some cities of British India, where labor is cheap and coal very dear, hundreds of vagabonds are often roped in to operate the machinery of a large workshop on the treadmill plan; but in spite of sanitary precautions a wheel-treader every now and then steps down and out with the unfeigned symptoms of complete exhaustion. "I tried it, for the fun of it," says Sir Samuel Baker, "but was unable to persist for more than ten minutes, though I am pretty sure that in my Ceylonese mountain camp the excitement of a boar-chase often enabled me to exert the tenfold amount of muscular effort without any conscious trace of fatigue."

   Every well-arranged household, in fact, should have an indoor sanitarium in the form of a general repair-shop, or Jack-of-all-trades resort. From an artistic point of view the products of the establishment may prove shameful failures, but they will save doctor's bills and perhaps police-court fines.

   " In freeing themselves from the bonds of an unworthy attachment," says Madame de Sévigné, "men have one great advantage: they can plunge into business, and forget;"—and a rush into a convenient workshop will often solve the problem of fighting clown minor temptations that cannot be exorcised by study.

   Combined with wholesome food and steady habits, indoor work has more than once enabled city-dwellers to emulate the physical prowess of rustics. Frederic Barbarossa's armies had been recruited among the bare-fisted peasantry of the South-German highlands but on the battlefield of Legano were crushingly defeated by the trainbands of some fourteen Italian cities. Roman legionaries held their own against the giants of the Teutonic forests, and the levies of the Hanseatic League prevailed against the federation of the iron-clad cavaliers that had for centuries treated them as an inferior species of bipeds. Lionheart Richard came to grief in a siege, and his German peer, Eberhart Longbeard of Wirtemberg was terribly beaten by the home-guards of a little manufacturing town.

"Wie haben da die Gerber so meisterlich gegerbt;
  Wie haben da die Farber so blutig roth gefarbt"—
        "How the tanners plied their trade,
          How the dyers dyed so red!"

—and all that in spite of the fact that the artisans of the Middle Ages were physically handicapped by the unsanitary condition of their streets and dwellings.

   Primitive nations can dispense with physical training-schools as the creatures of the wilderness dispense with houses and clothes, but city-dwellers need a substitute for the lost opportunities of outdoor exercise. Mental culture and gymnastics should be as inseparable as body and soul. "It is impossible to repress luxury by legislation," says Solon in Lucian's "Dialogues of Anacharsis," but its influence may be counteracted by athletic games, which invigorate the body and give a martial character to the amusements of our young men."

   And that remedial use of gymnastics requires the supervision of an expert teacher. It is not enough to provide an assortment of training-school apparatus and trust visitors to use it to good advantage. We might as well establish a free public drug-store and invite patients to come in and help themselves. I have seen athletics on the Let-Alone plan tried in a city park, and remember the results in the case of novices who got discouraged the first day by disfiguring accidents, and of others who contracted dyspepsia by exercising directly after dinner

   A well-developed system of physical culture offers remedies for almost even disorder of the human organism, and for all but the most hopeless malformations.

   As a preliminary, gymnasium pupils should be advised to postpone the principal meal of the day (call it supper or dinner) to the late afternoon, and at least half an hour after the conclusion of their exercises. Violent muscular efforts can exhaust the vital vigor of the organism to a degree which—for a short time—may take away the appetite, and make it advisable to defer repletion for a little while; but even a direct rush from the gymnasium to the dining-room would be hygienically preferable to the opposite mistake. After-dinner rest is recommended by the plainest monitions of instinct, by drowsiness, apathy, and aversion to strenuous efforts of any kind. After being nursed, a fretful child will fall asleep; gorged animals become torpid and retire to a resting-place—some of them for days and weeks. The physiological reason can be found in the fact that exercise interferes with digestion, and obliges the stomach to retain an accumulation of ingesta till there is a risk of their undergoing a process of fermentation and becoming a positive danger to the system they were intended to nourish.

   Beginners should also be warned against the mistake of continuing any special exercise to the length of excessive fatigue, and to avoid debilitating perspiration by choosing the lightest dress compatible with decency and comfort. "Gym-nos," in the language of the ancient champion gymnasts, meant "naked." A hampering load of drygoods is, indeed, often the first impediment to the free use of our motive organs, and the professional English trainer Stephens, of sprinting fame, recorded his experience that barefoot boys were his most promising pupils, because perfectly straight toes are of primary importance as qualifications for a victory on the footrace course.

   The kittels of South-German schoolboys—jackets with sleeves terminating at the elbow—are hard to beat for gymnastic purposes; and on general sanitary principles a course of physical culture should begin with arm-exercises. Dr. Schrodt called attention to the fact that in newborn children the lower extremities are only slightly larger than the arms, and that in our nearest zoological relatives the difference is next to nothing. But from the first to the end of the fourteenth year, when a boy may chance to be apprenticed to a handicraft, his legs get about ten times as many opportunities for development. At every step the muscles of the lower motive organs have to lift and move the weight of the body, while his hands are pocketed for future reference or swing idly to and fro. The result is a partial and unsymmetnc tendency of growth. The stout pedestals of the organism support a rickety superstructure.

   It should be the first object of gymnastics to counteract the consequences of that mistake, and a disposition to pulmonary disorders can thus often be nipped in the germ. Microbes are specially apt to fasten upon torpid and neglected parts of the organism. Like caterpillars scattered by a gale, they can be dislodged by a movement-cure, and, besides, arm-gymnastics help to correct the most frequent of all malformations: vis., a narrow chest.

   Weak lungs must have been a rarely-heard-of complaint at a time when the rising generation of a whole continent was trained in spear-throwing. Consumption microbes had no chance to effect a lodging in a body getting the benefit of that exercise. And as a prescription for the lung-suffering results of indoor life no remedy of the drug-store can compete with a course of Gerwerfen, as the German turners call their attempt to revise that form of athletics, which a modern educator describes as follows:

   "The missile is a lance of some tough wood (ash and hickory preferred) about ten feet long and one and a half inches in diameter, terminating in a blunt iron knob to steady the throw and keep the wood from splintering. A heavy post with a movable top-piece (the Ger-block) forms the target, the head-shaped top being secured by means of a stout cramp-hinge that permits it to turn over, but not to fall down. Distance all the way from ten to forty paces Grasp the spear near the middle, raise it to the height of your ear, plant the left foot firmly on the ground, the right knee slightly bent, fix your eye on the target, lean back and let drive. If you hit the log squarely in the center, or a trifle higher up, it will topple over, but, still hanging by the clasp-hinge, can be quickly adjusted for the next thrower. A feeble hit will not stir the ponderous Ger-block; the spear has to impinge with the force of a sixty-pound blow, so that a successful throw is also an athletic triumph. The German spear throwers are generally lads after the heart of Charles Reade—ambidextrous boys, whose either handed strength and skill illustrates the fact that the antiquity of a prejudice proves nothing in its favor." For indoor exercise an equivalent can be constructed with a stout rope and a couple of leather-covered iron rings—say, six inches in diameter. Dangling from a high ceiling or the beam of a barn, a grapple-swing can be used for a great variety of acrobatic evolutions: Dangling, swinging to and fro, slowly at first, then faster and faster (with the aid of the plunging feet); "turning over," and whirling heels over head, till the protest of the wrist-joints enforces a pause.

   Breathing-pauses will be often needed the first week, but afterwards at even longer intervals—indicating the lung-strengthening effects of the exercise.

   Lifting weights and holding them out at arm's length is a favorite amusement of the Tyrolese peasants, whose knee-joints mountain climbing has made almost fatigue-proof, and who intuitively seem to recognize the expedience of giving their arms the benefit of a movement cure. A by-purpose of theirs is the wish to strengthen their wrists for the ordeal of a wrestling match, and wrestlers with the incubus of a hereditary disorder would often do well to imitate their example.

   Weight lifting in that manner is the germ of the dumb-bell cure and in more than one sense the hardiest of all health exercises. A homemade sandbag or a pail full of water will do for a beginning. In rain-weather, when the programme for pedestrian exercise has to be cancelled, dumb-bells or their substitutes are still available, even in a tenement attic, and their persistent use can be guaranteed to redeem the victims of general debility.

   The beneficial effects of the exercise are indeed almost sure to manifest themselves in time to obviate the most of all pathological risks: The moral collapse of a patient who resigns himself to his fate and plunges into dissipations to "make an end of it" and harden the consummation of what he has come to consider an inevitable doom. A Texas cotton planter of my acquaintance worked like a beaver to save his crop from a protracted drought, but after watching the signs of the sky day after day for two months and seeing no indication of a change, all of a sudden became reckless, sold his horses, harness and farming tools at throw-away prices, got drunk, and wound up with an escapade that obliged him to enlist in the army to have a tent, if not a roof, over his head. A week after that cataclysm of his hopes the long-prayed for rain-clouds did rise from the gulf, and a series of abundant showers enabled the purchaser of his farm to double his stake the first year.

   "Blast such a climate," growled his predecessor in self-defence, "if there had been the least sign of a change a little sooner, I might have pulled through."

   And in that respect remedial gymnastics offer an inestimable advantage, both over drug-mongery and all sorts of faith-cures.

   There are ebbs and tides in the vicissitudes of vital vigor, and the self-regulating faculties of the organism may rally in a manner to overcome both the disease and the drug; abiding faith may at last reward the patron of a prayer agent. But in either case the hoped-for symptoms of recovery are sadly apt to reveal themselves too late—the normal tendency of the experiment being, indeed, a change from bad to worse, for the sweat-box misery of a prayer conclave may prove as baneful as a course of blue-pills. Peering desperately for a sign of dawn, the patient at last becomes impatient, and procures an anodyne, or takes other measures to travel the dark road as swiftly as possible.

   Movement-cures, on the other hand, reveal their benefit after the end of a week or so—at first by improvements in the facility of the exercise itself, but soon also by indisputable physiological changes for the better. The appetite revives, sleep becomes quieter and more protracted, till the depressing feeling of helplessness gives way to the buoyancy of self-confidence.

   In that way Dr. Winship of Boston recovered his lost self-respect. The "crime of weakness" had obliged him to submit to the insults of a bully, and he resolved to become a man in the ancient heroic sense of the word or renounce an existence whose blessings had ceased to outweigh its evils. Lifting weights and swinging a pair of ring-weighted Indian clubs soon began to improve his appearance and inspire him with hopes he would not have bartered the wealth of a sick boodle magnate, but he continued his exercises, adding heavier and heavier rings, he continued to throw weights and lift weights till he became the physical superior of his insulter and at last a modern Samson, able to handle burdens in a way that transcends belief—and incidentally equally expert in the task of grappling with the burdens of existence. Bag-punching may be made a diverting intermezzo of more strenuous exercises, and it is altogether a good plan to vary the programme of gymnastic prescriptions, now and then. There, as elsewhere, a change of employment will make frequent fast days less necessary. Canadian lumbermen, in the blest absence of Blue-law spies, often devote their Sundays to hunting trips and scramble up and down deep mountain ridges, with all the energy of sportsmen who have passed the week in a city office and need their holidays for outdoor exercise. Those anti-Sabbatharian woodcutters may actually get a double dose of hard work on their leisure day, but cheerfully go to chopping again on Monday morning, while a month of uniform drudgery would probably put half of them on the sick-list. That there are true specifics on the remedy-list of the gymnasium, as well as of the drug store, is proved by the efficacy of the movement-cure for asthma. A straight stick, about five feet long, is marked from end to end with deep notches—some twenty of them altogether. A ten-pound weight with a hook complete the inexpensive apparatus. The exercise consists in grasping the stick at the thicker end, raising it to the level of the chin and thrusting it out like a fencing-foil, draw it back slowly and push it out again, keeping it as nearly as possible horizontal. Then hook the weight to one of the near-by notches and try to repeat the home-thrust manoeuvre. Every notch further out will increase the weight and the strain on the arm muscles, till at last a slip from the level indicates the limit of the experiment. With the weight on the farthest practicable notch even an athlete will notice that the exercise reacts on the mechanism of the lungs. The breath comes and goes in gasps,—involving coughs, perhaps, if the bronchial tubes are clogged with phlegm, but at the same time the feeling of pulmonary impediments is gradually relieved. The experimenter finds that he can breathe freer and deeper than before. That improvement may not be a permanent one, but the beneficial after-effects of the exercise just suffice to break the spell of an asthma fit. A daily repetition of the cure at last obviates the risk of a relapse for weeks to come; the patient can relax the strictness of his dietetic precaution and venture to leave his sleeping chair for a horizontal couch without the dread of being waked by a suffocation fit.

   And it is a significant fact that not every kind of arm-exercise will serve the purpose of an asthma cure. Wood-cutting, for instance, is very apt to exert an opposite effect; the shock seems to aggravate the distress of the lungs and tighten the grip of the dyspnoea or chronic disability to get a full breath of life-air. Nor is that experience limited to weaklings. I remember an interview with a broad-shouldered, but financially rather straightened, Tennessee mountain carpenter, who confessed with a sigh that he was obliged to do nearly all his axe work by proxy. "I used to try it, anyhow," said he, "but it 'cut my wind' so often that I'm not going to put my foot in that trap again. It's better to be poor than going through such misery"—stating several cases to illustrate a theory to the effect that fate had reduced him to the alternative of getting short of cash or of air. Weight-carrying in warm weather, by the way, is likewise so unmistakably detrimental to the comfort of weak lungs, that asthma patients instinctively avoid farm work, though they may be fond of country life and outdoor exercise.

   About twenty years ago a North Yankee invented a "rowing machine," which he intended to facilitate the preparatory exercises of oarsmen,—without perhaps suspecting that he had provided an almost infallible mechanical constipation cure. The apparatus can be worked indoors, and adapted to various degrees of strength, and the exercise (a close imitation of the movements incident to the task of rowing a cockle-boat against the stream) reacts on the functions of the digestive organs in a manner that must be experienced to be credited. Close tools that have resisted other sanitary prescriptions and yielded only temporarily to drastic drugs, are relieved permanently before the end of half a week. An hour of work in the morning and about half an hour in the evening (before supper) is enough to insure that result, and in combination with cold sponge-baths will make drug-medication wholly superfluous in all but the most inveterate cases of dyspepsia. Far-gone dyspeptics have to invoke the third remedy of nature: A fasting-cure. In cool weather the triple prescription will do its work in a couple of weeks and so effectively that subsequent relapses can be avoided by the most ordinary dietetic precautions.

   In a former chapter I have mentioned a movement-cure specific for diarrhoea, viz., pedestrian exercise, especially in warm weather. On stormy winter days carrying weights (say, buckets full of coal) upstairs, for an hour or two, will prove a remedial equivalent. With the co-operation of a spare diet its efficacy will manifest itself before the end of the second day, unless the digestive organs should have been outrageously deranged by the abuse of virulent drugs.

   Sleeplessness will eventually yield to almost any kind of physical exercise (quicker than to brain work), but among its mechanical specifics a German physician mentions mountain climbing. In explanation of his personal experience he has a theory that vertigo (dizziness) and the excitement of a perilous path at the brink of steep cliffs affect the brain in a manner that craves the relief of sleep. He also recommends several gymnastic substitutes (Ersatz Mittel), e. g., ladder climbing on the hand-over-hand plan. Place a long stout ladder against a wall at an angle of 45 degrees, and attend to the precautions against the risk of slipping. Then step underneath, grasp the highest round you can reach with outstretched arms, draw yourself up to the next higher one—feet now dangling clear off the ground; up to the next, higher again, and so on, till dizziness or exhaustion suggest the descent of man. Rest for a few minutes, or engage in lighter exercise, then at it again, and after half an hour of ups and downs conclude the soiree, and watch its effects on the chance for a good night's rest. It is a common experience of mountain tourists that, upon retiring for the night, they are for a while haunted by visions of yawning chasms, till yawns of a different sort offer a change of programme, and the Brocken-spectre ridden brain seeks refuge in slumber. The blest contrast of the horizontal couch may help to enhance the attractiveness of that change, and sleep supervenes without the aid of opiates.

   The excitement of competitive gymnastics is equally effective in relieving the torpor of the reaction following the abuse of strong liquors. With all the firm resolves inspired by the appeals of a temperance orator, the new convert cannot help feeling a more and more urgent craving for a stimulant of some sort or other, and by a sort of instinct, welcomes an opportunity for soul-stirring pastimes. Miners at work in a bonanza pit would scorn the offer of a dram-bottle—they have found a more pleasant intoxicant. Gamblers, too, become abstemious under the influence of an exciting game, especially as long as the dice fall in their favor; and mountain peak climbers of the Tyndall school ask no better tonic.

   There are health seekers so exhausted by wasting diseases or the abuse of drugs that they are unable to participate in the exercises of a public gymnasium. Old school physicians would have consigned them to the inactivity of a sweltering sick-room. Faith curists, with their antics, would to some degree mitigate the tedium of that ordeal; but the patient would still be doomed to that most grievous trial of patience: the necessity to suffer without a chance to promote the progress of improvement by individual efforts.

   The movement cure plan offers that chance even to the most far-gone victims of debilitating disorders. As long as the apathy of exhaustion has not yet merged in the trance of the endless night, the possibility of exercise always implies the possibility of recovery.

   The manager of a "Life-under-glass" hospital invited patronage by an artistic signboard, informing the public that "Warmth is Life, Cold is Death." Yes, death to microbes, at all events, commented an apostle of the refrigeration cure, after mentioning a variety of cases where disease germs could be dislodged or killed by a degree of cold which their living boarding house could survive without difficulty and even without discomfort.

   "Motion is life, apathy is death," would be a less misleading motto.

   Bedridden patients should not be urged to keep quiet when they begin to fret for a chance to exercise their motive organs in some way or other. Faute de mieux, they may be encouraged to sit up in bed, and recline, by turns, or roll from side to side. It will help to keep the blood in circulation and prevent bed-sores and hyponchondria. Any modification of physical exercise, in fact, will extend its beneficial influence to the mind of the patient, and the protracted slumber following fatigue will assist the remedial efforts of nature, and mitigate distress by the balm of oblivion.

   The exercises which follow, illustrated by a number of excellent photographs, can be adapted to every degree of convalescence.

  Those movements illustrated with dumb-bells can be taken with free hand or with anything that    can be grasped conveniently in the hands. There should not be a weight of over two or three pounds in each hand unless inclined to be strong.

   Be very careful not to overdo the exercises the first few attempts.

   Exercise No. 1 will relieve the respiratory torpor of debilitating disorders and the aftereffects of pneumonia. Of benefit also in several phases of heart disease.

   Exercise No. 2 will aid the functions of the digestive organs and act as a specific in promoting recovery from accidents involving injuries to the spine. Prevented paralysis and greatly relieved the mental distress of the patient in the case of a carpenter who had fallen from a high scaffold and was brought in, pale with terror, and as he supposed permanently crippled in his lower extremities. He had lost the use of his voluntary muscles from the hips down, and felt "numb;" experienced but little benefit from several applications of electricity, but on the fifth day noticed that he could slightly raise one of his feet. Steadily exercising the sinews of that foot, he contrived the next day to raise it about half a yard above the mattress of his bed, and his recovery from  that time was continuous and rapid, aided, as it was, by the influence of hope.

   Exercise No. 4 will benefit sufferers from kidney complaints and digestive obstructions. Also an effective remedy for obstructions of the respiratory organs. Its incidental tendency to strengthen the spine should recommend its addition to the list of callisthenics and health movements to be repeated before breakfast every morning in the year.

   Exercise No. 5 is a constipation cure, more permanently effective than any drug, and not followed by troublesome reactions. Combined with cold sponge-baths it will relieve the torpor of the bowels before the evening of the second day. Continue for a quarter of an hour, the first and second morning; for about five minutes every following day. Lengthen or shorten that time according to the varying evidences of efficacy.

   Exercise No. 6 is a cure (as well as preventive) for disorders of the kidneys.

   Exercise No. 7 is of advantage in stimulating the actions of the lungs in cases where" patients are unable to leave their bed.

   Exercise No. 8 is a constipation cure for invalids, as well as those desiring to counteract the effects of sedentary occupations. Its adoption in hospitals and sanitariums would obviate the necessity of a resort to laxative drugs.

   Exercise No. 9 is an asthma specific. Continued for thirty minutes every evening it will save the patient hours of struggles with agony of suffocation. Like the balance, stick exercise described in the proceeding chapter, it tends to break the spell of the pulmonary spasm, and the danger of a relapse (though extant, as in all phases of the most incalculable of all organic disorders) is not half as imminent as in cases where relief has been obtained by the use of palliating drugs. The fumes of stramonia (Jimson weed, or thorn apple) induce a deadly nausea which, as it were, by the menace of a more serious peril, overcomes the air-famine and sets the lungs a gasping, while the sufferer's face is moistened by a cold perspiration. Inhaling charcoal fumes would provoke similar symptoms. The grip of the choking fit does relax while the nausea lasts, but as soon as the sickening effects of the poison-fumes subside the patient feels the premonitions of pulmonary trouble and hardly ventures to stir for fear of provoking another strangling fit. The effect of  the movement cure specific is a relief of a very different kind. The sense of a slight insufficiency in the allowance of life-air still remains, but the lungs move at ease, the obstructive difficulty appears to have been remedied by a direct removal of the cause.

   Exercise No. 10 will relieve the feeling of oppression in abdominal congestions and various gastric troubles. May be prescribed to advantage during the spasms following the paroxysm of a congestive chill. "Artificial respiration," as physicians call it, may be effected by moving the arms in a similar manner, as for the revival of half-drowned persons.

   Exercise No. 11 is a modification of No. 2 in cases where patient is unable to turn over on his side. Will react on the muscles of the hips and spine and benefit invalids incapable of any other exercise.

   Exercise No. 12 is a movement tending to stimulate the action of the intestines, and helping to prevent derangements of the digestive process. Has been tested in seasickness with results that have been explained by the conjecture that it counteracts the anti-peristaltii movements of the bowels—in plainer words the tendency of the ingesta to revert towards the stomach. Sailors becoming conscious of a qualmish feeling about the region of the digestive apparatus, start for the rigging to "work it off," and succeed better it would seem, than experimenters with Dr. Mackenzie's chemical bowel-regulator.

   Exercise No. 13 is a severe test of the abdominal muscles, but of great benefit to invalids who are temporarily incapacitated from pedestrian exercise, as by injuries to the foot or flexor sinews. May be continued, with long pauses, for a quarter of an hour at a time, twice or three times a day.

   Exercise No. 14 is about the best movement to bring relief from the vigor of sinews strained by weight-lifting, or stiffened by long-continued inactivity, as in the case of bedridden invalids.

   Exercise No. 15 will strengthen the muscles of the neck and shoulder and might often exceed the efficacy of local application in breaking the spell of tetanus, or "lockjaw." The premonitory symptoms of that mysterious disorder are frequently attended with a feeling of soreness about the very muscles which this form of dumbbell exercise tends to invigorate. "Keep moving your arms, keep moving your arms," was Dr. Benjamin Rush's constant advice to sufferers from injuries that began to threaten tetanic complications.

   Exercises Nos. 16 and 17 are modifications of the foregoing, and the best "vivacious exercise" for invalids temporarily deprived of the use of their lower extremities. Soldiers with their shoulder-joints cramped by the straps of a heavy knapsack and with their arms hanging idle, can be kept in a fair state of health by pedestrian exercise alone, and, vice versa, the total inactivity of the lower motive organs may be compensated by a persistent use of dumb-bells in the manner described in the two last paragraphs.

   Exercise No. 18 is a movement cure for invalids, but also a first-class aid to digestion under circumstances making other forms of exercise unavailable. It is a last resort kind of motion cure and affords a fair chance to test the difference between the simplest sort of exercise and no exercise at all.

   The choice of any special form of movement cure should be decided by the exigencies of their purpose to compensate the deficient opportunities of daily life. Persons engaged in sedentary occupations, alternating with domestic chances for arm exercise (wood-cutting, amateur carpentering, etc.,) should devote their leisure to pedestrianism or some class of gymnastics tending to develop the muscles of the lower motive organs. The great plurality of city dwellers who find daily occasion for walking matches against time, should give their arms the benefit of daily dumb-bell exercise, and patronize the flying trapeze on every visit to a public gymnasium.

   A year's practice is almost sure to develop a prediction for some form of athletic exercise but the experience of every gymnasium teacher proves that, on the other hand, there are also individuals with a practically unconquerable aversion to special branches of his curriculum. These antipathies may often be founded on anomalies of physical structure, and are thus akin to the instinctive repugnance to certain kinds of food. Dr. W. Carpenter mentions the case of a boy who had a horror naturalis of mutton, and who at every attempt to overcome that dislike was seized with violent vomiting fits. His guardian was inclined to ascribe that caprice to the effects of imagination, and, by way of experiment, treated his ward to a meat-pie containing mutton disguised by spices, but the result remained the same, and the patient, who would have made a popular neighbor of certain Australian stock-farmers, was publicly recognized as a boy with a stomach that could not digest mutton.

   And practice is almost equally unavailing to overcome the disinclination of some gymnasium pupils to special kinds of exercise—heel over head evolutions on a trapeze or horizontal bar, for instance. I have known gymnasts who complained of sick headaches whenever the routine of the educational programme obliged them to conquer that aversion, and a good rule in such cases is to accept the verdict of nature as final, if the repugnance should continue to assert itself after the tyro has mastered the technical difficulties of the exercise.

   But it is also certain that habit develops an association of ideas between special ailments and their appropriate gymnastic remedies. I have mentioned the expedient of sailors who "work off" qualms of seasickness by volunteer exercise in the rigging and an old teacher of my acquaintance occasionally leaves the class-room to nip an incipient attack of asthma with a pair of dumbbells.

   Hay-fever, I think, could often be knocked out with Indian clubs, and more than one victim of rheumatism has learned the trick of walking away from the premonitory symptoms of his affliction. A time may come when patients of all sorts will hurry to a gymnasium as they now hasten to a drug store.

   The power of established prejudices, it is true, has almost no limits, but now and then yields to the dictates of fashion, and by good luck physical exercise is a cosmetic. People who do not realize that weakness and disease are crimes, may consent to recover because it is also the surest way to get pretty. They will appreciate the logic of their looking-glass.

   "By their system of physical culture," says a Scotch author, "the Greeks realized that beautiful symmetry of shape which for us exists only in the ideal, or in the forms of divinity which they sculptured from figures of such perfect proportions."

   Health is beauty; strength imparts ease of deportment; the paragons of fashion have constantly to recruit their ranks from the products of the forests and prairies; under the stimulus of outdoor exercise grace develops its fairest flowers

"Yet not one of all that did try
  Could play like Elfy, the Gypsy-boy."

   Physical exercise is destined to effect the regeneration of the Caucasian race; but we should remember that it cannot at once counteract the mischief of all our manifold sins against the health laws of nature. It may prolong the lives of grog-drinking sailors, but cannot bleach their bottle-noses. It enables the hunters of the Pampas to digest a diet of bull-beef, but cannot save them from lung diseases if they pass the nights in smoky dug-outs.

   Like the three Graces, the three remedies of Nature should go hand in hand.

   Under the reign of old-time medical delusions, a sick man's first impulse was to "take something," i. c. to swallow a dose of poison drugs. A sanitarian's first thought, under the same circumstances, should be to stop swallowing, i. e. to fast for a day or two. Those who insist on "taking something" should be advised to take a cold bath, or an hour's exercise in the gymnasium.

   Shall we dispense with chemical medicaments altogether?

   The current of sanitary reform is certainly setting strongly in that very direction. In spite of quack-revivals, the time is coming and it not far, when intelligent physicians will prescribe drugs only for external application, as in cutaneous disorders, where their effect amounts to a direct removal of the cause, and internally only in analogous cases, as for the expulsion of intestinal parasites.

   With these few exceptions, the disorders of the human organism will be trusted to the self-regulating tendency of nature, aided by the influence of the three natural stimulants: Fasting, Refrigeration, and Exercise. The disciples of Natural Hygiene will try to deserve the blessings which the dupes of the drug-monger attempt to buy across the counter; instead of changing their hospital or their course of medication they will change their habits, and their loss of faith in a few popular superstitions will be compensated by an abundant gain in health.