as gentlemen, and needs
no apostle; the open weather of the current winter has been unusually
favorable for its practice, and it is destined to become a permanent
institution.

A word, in passing, on the literature of athletic exercises; it is too
scanty to detain us long. Five hundred books, it is estimated, have been
written on the digestive organs, but we shall not speak of half a
dozen in connection with the muscular powers. The common Physiologies
recommend exercise in general terms, but seldom venture on details;
unhappily, they are written, for the most part, by men who have already
lost their own health, and are therefore useful as warnings rather than
examples. The first real book of gymnastics printed in this country, so
far as we know, was the work of the veteran Salzmann, translated and
published in Philadelphia, in 1802, and sometimes to be met with in
libraries,--an odd, desultory book, with many good reasonings and
suggestions, and quaint pictures of youths exercising in the old German
costume. Like Dr. Follen's gymnasium, at Cambridge, it was probably
transplanted too early, and produced no effect. Next came, in 1836, the
book which is still, after twenty years, the standard, so far as it
goes,--Walker's "Manly Exercises,"--a thoroughly English book, and
needing adaptation to our habits, but full of manly vigor, and
containing good and copious directions for skating, swimming, boating,
and horsemanship. The only later general treatise worth naming is Dr.
Trall's recently published "Family Gymnasium,"--a good book, yet not
good enough. On gymnastics proper it contains scarcely anything; and the
essays on rowing, riding, and skating are so meagre, that they might
almost as well have been omitted, though that on swimming is excellent.
The main body of the book is devoted to the subject of calisthenics,
and especially to Ling's system; all this is valuable for its novelty,
although we cannot imagine how a system so tediously elaborate and so
little interesting can ever be made very useful for American pupils.
Miss Beecher has an excellent essay on calisthenics, with very useful
figures, at the end of her "Physiology." And on proper gymnastic
exercises there is a little book so full and admirable, that it
atones for the defects of all the others,--"Paul Preston's
Gymnastics,"--nominally a child's book, but so spirited and graphic,
and entering so admirably into the whole extent of the subject, that it
ought