“From your own experience?”

“From my own experience.  I can tell you, as a medical man, that a proportion, and not by any means a small one, of the young men who are now putting themselves to violent athletic tests of their strength and endurance, are taking that course to the serious and permanent injury of their own health.  The public who attend rowing-matches, foot-races, and other exhibitions of that sort, see nothing but the successful results of muscular training.  Fathers and mothers at home see the failures.  There are households in England—­miserable households, to be counted, Sir Patrick, by more than ones and twos—­in which there are young men who have to thank the strain laid on their constitutions by the popular physical displays of the present time, for being broken men, and invalided men, for the rest of their lives.”

“Do you hear that?” said Sir Patrick, looking at Geoffrey.

Geoffrey carelessly nodded his head.  His irritation had had time to subside; the stolid indifference had got possession of him again.  He had resumed his chair—­he sat, with outstretched legs, staring stupidly at the pattern on the carpet.  “What does it matter to Me?” was the sentiment expressed all over him, from head to foot.

The surgeon went on.

“I can see no remedy for this sad state of things,” he said, “as long as the public feeling remains what the public feeling is now.  A fine healthy-looking young man, with a superb muscular development, longs (naturally enough) to distinguish himself like others.  The training-authorities at his college, or elsewhere, take him in hand (naturally enough again) on the strength of outward appearances.  And whether they have been right or wrong in choosing him is more than they can say, until the experiment has been tried, and the mischief has been, in many cases, irretrievably done.  How many of them are aware of the important physiological truth, that the muscular power of a man is no fair guarantee of his vital power?  How many of them know that we all have (as a great French writer puts it) two lives in us—­the surface life of the muscles, and the inner life of the heart, lungs, and brain?  Even if they did know this—­even with medical men to help them—­it would be in the last degree doubtful, in most cases, whether any previous examination would result in any reliable discovery of the vital fitness of the man to undergo the stress of muscular exertion laid on him.  Apply to any of my brethren; and they will tell you, as the result of their own professional observation, that I am, in no sense, overstating this serious evil, or exaggerating the deplorable and dangerous consequences to which it leads.  I have a patient at this moment, who is a young man of twenty, and who possesses one of the finest muscular developments I ever saw in my life.  If that young man had consulted me, before he followed the example of the other young men about him, I can not honestly say that I could have foreseen