hearty, so profoundly confident in the omnipotence of his own
methods and the uselessness of all others, with such a ready invention,
and such an inundation of animal spirits that he could flood any
company, no matter how starched or listless, with an unbounded appetite
for ball-games and bean-games. How long it will last in the hands of
others than the projector remains to be seen, especially as some of his
feats are more exhausting than average gymnastics; but, in the mean
time, it is just what is wanted for multitudes of persons who find or
fancy the real gymnasium to be unsuited to them. It will especially
render service to female pupils, so far as they practise it; for the
accustomed gymnastic exercises seem never yet to have been rendered
attractive to them, on any large scale, and with any permanency. Girls,
no doubt, learn as readily as boys to row, to skate, and to swim,--any
muscular inferiority being perhaps counterbalanced in swimming by
their greater physical buoyancy, in skating by their dancing-school
experience, and in rowing by their music-lessons enabling them more
promptly to fall into regular time,--though these suggestions may all be
fancies rather than facts. The same points help them, perhaps, in the
lighter calisthenic exercises; but when they come to the apparatus, one
seldom sees a girl who takes hold like a boy: it, perhaps, requires a
certain ready capital of muscle, at the outset, which they have not at
command, and which it is tedious to acquire afterwards. Yet there seem
to be some cases, as with the classes of Mrs. Molineaux at Cambridge,
where a good deal of gymnastic enthusiasm is created among female
pupils, and it may be, after all, that the deficiency lies thus far in
the teachers.

Experience is already showing that the advantages of school-gymnasiums
go deeper than was at first supposed. It is not to be the whole object
of American education to create scholars or idealists, but to produce
persons of a solid strength,--persons who, to use the most expressive
Western phrase that ever was coined into five monosyllables, "will do to
tie to"; whereas to most of us it would be absurd to tie anything but
the Scriptural millstone. In the military school of Brienne, the only
report appended to the name of the little Napoleon Bonaparte was "Very
healthy"; and it is precisely this class of boys for whom there is least
place in a purely intellectual institution. A child of immense animal
activ