not originating with Dr. Windship.  Even he, at the beginning of his exhibitions, used those weighing only ninety-eight pounds; and it was considered an astonishing feat, when, a little earlier, Mr. Richard Montgomery used to “put up” a dumb-bell weighing one hundred and one pounds.  A good many persons, in different parts of the country, now handle one hundred and twenty-five, and Dr. Windship has got much farther on.  There is, of course, a knack in using these little articles, as in every other feat, yet it takes good extensor muscles to get beyond the fifties.  The easiest way of elevating the weight is to swing it up from between the knees; or it may be thrown up from the shoulder, with a simultaneous jerk of the whole body; but the only way of doing it handsomely is to put it up from the shoulder with the arm alone, without bending the knee, though you may bend the body as much as you please.  Dr. Windship now puts up one hundred and forty-one pounds in this manner, and by the aid of a jerk can elevate one hundred and eighty with one arm.  This particular movement with dumb-bells is most practised, as affording a test of strength; but there are many other ways of using them, all exceedingly invigorating, and all safe enough, unless the weight employed be too great, which it is very apt to be.  Indeed, there is so much danger of this, that at Cambridge it has been deemed best to exclude all beyond seventy pounds.  Nevertheless, the dumb-bell remains the one available form of home or office exercise:  it is a whole athletic apparatus packed up in the smallest space; it is gymnastic pemmican.  With one fifty-pound dumb-bell, or a pair of half that size—­or more or less, according to his strength and habits,—­a man may exercise nearly every muscle in his body in half an hour, if he has sufficient ingenuity in positions.  If it were one’s fortune to be sent to prison,—­and the access to such retirement is growing more and more facile in many regions of our common country,—­one would certainly wish to carry a dumb-bell with him, precisely as Dr. Johnson carried an arithmetic in his pocket on his tour to the Hebrides, as containing the greatest amount of nutriment in the compactest form.

Apparatus for lifting is not yet introduced into most gymnasiums, in spite of the recommendations of the Roxbury Hercules:  beside the fear of straining, there is the cumbrous weight and cost of iron apparatus, while, for some reason or other, no cheap and accurate dynamometer has yet come into the market.  Running and jumping, also, have as yet been too much neglected in our institutions, or practised spasmodically rather than systematically.  It is singular how little pains have been taken to ascertain definitely what a man can do with his body,—­far less, as Quetelet has observed, than in regard to any animal which man has tamed, or any machine which he has invented.  It is stated, for instance, in Walker’s “Manly Exercises,” that six feet is the maximum of