elessly snagged
upon indigestible diet. As yet, it is difficult to obtain a hearing for
precaution. Men answer you out of their past experience,--much like a
headstrong personage who was about to attempt crossing a river in a
boat sure to sink. "You will drown, if you go in that thing," said a
bystander. "Never was drowned yet," was the prompt retort; and pushing
off, he soon lost the opportunity to repeat that boast! But this
resistance is constantly becoming less. Meantime, numbers of foreseeing
men are waking up, or are already awakened, to the importance of
recreation and physical culture,--members of the clerical profession,
to the credit of the craft be it said, taking the lead. Messrs.
Beecher, Bellows, and Hale plead the cause of amusements; the author of
"Saints and their Bodies" celebrates the uses and urges the need of
athletic sports; gymnasia are becoming matters of course in the cities
and larger towns; "The New York Tribune" attends to the matter of
cookery; and it is safe to predict that the habits of the people will
undergo in time the necessary changes. That health is possible to
Americans ought not to be questioned. Of despair we will not listen to
a word. In crossing the ocean, in the backwoods-experience which
everywhere precedes cultivation, in the excitement which has followed
the obliteration of social monopolies and the throwing open of the
wealth of a continent to free competition, the old traditional
precautions have been lost, the old household wisdoms, the old
economies of health; and these we have now to reproduce for ourselves.
It will be done. And when this is done, though ancient English brawn
will not reappear, there will be health, and its great blessing of
cheerful spirits. The special means by which this shall be accomplished
we leave to the care of the gentlemen abovenamed, and their
compeers--merely putting in one word for _gentle_ exercise, and two
words for the cherishing of mental health, the expulsion of morbid
excitements, assume what guise they may. We should take extreme care
not to admit decay at the summit. A healthy soul is a better
prophylactic than belladonna. Refusing to despond respecting American
health, we cheerfully trust that the genius of the New Man will find
all required physical support, and due length of time for demonstrating
its quality.

And now we may notice a doubt which some readers will cherish. Is not
all this, they may say, over-sanguine and enthusi