But the gymnasium is the normal type of all muscular exercise,—­the only form of it which is impartial and comprehensive, which has something for everybody, which is available at all seasons, through all weathers, in all latitudes.  All other provisions are limited:  you cannot row in winter nor skate in summer, spite of parlor-skates and ice-boats; ball-playing requires comrades; riding takes money; everything needs daylight:  but the gymnasium is always accessible.  Then it is the only thing which trains the whole body.  Military drill makes one prompt, patient, erect, accurate, still, strong.  Rowing takes one set of muscles and stretches them through and through, till you feel yourself turning into one long spiral spring from finger-tips to toes.  In cricket or base-ball, a player runs, strikes, watches, catches, throws, must learn endurance also.  Yet, no matter which of these may be your special hobby, you must, if you wish to use all the days and all the muscles, seek the gymnasium at last,—­the only thorough panacea.

The history of modern gymnastic exercises is easily written:  it is proper to say modern,—­for, so far as apparatus goes, the ancient gymnasiums seem to have had scarcely anything in common with our own.  The first institution on the modern plan was founded at Schnepfenthal, near Gotha, in Germany, in 1785, by Salzmann, a clergyman and the principal of a boys’ school.  After eight years of experience, his assistant, Gutsmuths, wrote a book upon the subject, which was translated into English, and published at London in 1799 and at Philadelphia in 1800, under the name of “Salzmann’s Gymnastics.”  No similar institution seems to have existed in either country, however, till those established by Voelckers, in London, in 1824, and by Dr. Follen, at Cambridge, Mass., in 1826.  Both were largely patronized at first, and died out at last.  The best account of Voelckers’s establishment will be found in Hone’s “Every-Day Book”; its plan seems to have been unexceptionable.  But Dr. James Johnson, writing his “Economy of Health” ten years after, declared that these German exercises had proved “better adapted to the Spartan youth than to the pallid sons of pampered cits, the dandies of the desk, and the squalid tenants of attics and factories,” and also adds the epitaph, “This ultra-gymnastic enthusiast did much injury to an important branch of hygiene by carrying it to excess, and consequently by causing its desuetude.”  And Dr. Jarvis, in his “Practical Physiology,” declares the unquestionable result of the American experiment to have been “general failure.”

Accordingly, the English, who are reputed kings in all physical exercises, have undoubtedly been far surpassed by the Germans, and even by the French, in gymnastics.  The writer of the excellent little “Handbook for Gymnastics,” George Forrest, M.A., testifies strongly to this deficiency.  “It is curious that we English, who possess perhaps the finest and strongest figures of all European nations,