Consider, for example, the effects of a well-toned motor-apparatus, nervous and muscular, on our general personal self-consciousness, the sense of elasticity and efficiency that results.  They tell us that in Norway the life of the women has lately been entirely revolutionized by the new order of muscular feelings with which the use of the ski, or long snow-shoes, as a sport for both sexes, has made the women acquainted.  Fifteen years ago the Norwegian women were even more than the women of other lands votaries of the old-fashioned ideal of femininity, ‘the domestic angel,’ the ‘gentle and refining influence’ sort of thing.  Now these sedentary fireside tabby-cats of Norway have been trained, they say, by the snow-shoes into lithe and audacious creatures, for whom no night is too dark or height too giddy, and who are not only saying good-bye to the traditional feminine pallor and delicacy of constitution, but actually taking the lead in every educational and social reform.  I cannot but think that the tennis and tramping and skating habits and the bicycle-craze which are so rapidly extending among our dear sisters and daughters in this country are going also to lead to a sounder and heartier moral tone, which will send its tonic breath through all our American life.

I hope that here in America more and more the ideal of the well-trained and vigorous body will be maintained neck by neck with that of the well-trained and vigorous mind as the two coequal halves of the higher education for men and women alike.  The strength of the British Empire lies in the strength of character of the individual Englishman, taken all alone by himself.  And that strength, I am persuaded, is perennially nourished and kept up by nothing so much as by the national worship, in which all classes meet, of athletic outdoor life and sport.

I recollect, years ago, reading a certain work by an American doctor on hygiene and the laws of life and the type of future humanity.  I have forgotten its author’s name and its title, but I remember well an awful prophecy that it contained about the future of our muscular system.  Human perfection, the writer said, means ability to cope with the environment; but the environment will more and more require mental power from us, and less and less will ask for bare brute strength.  Wars will cease, machines will do all our heavy work, man will become more and more a mere director of nature’s energies, and less and less an exerter of energy on his own account.  So that, if the homo sapiens of the future can only digest his food and think, what need will he have of well-developed muscles at all?  And why, pursued this writer, should we not even now be satisfied with a more delicate and intellectual type of beauty than that which pleased our ancestors?  Nay, I have heard a fanciful friend make a still further advance in this ‘new-man’ direction.  With our future food, he says, itself prepared in liquid