Happily the matter is beginning to attract attention.  The writings of Mr. Kingsley indicate a reaction against over-culture; carried perhaps, as reactions usually are, somewhat too far.  Occasional letters and leaders in the newspapers have shown an awakening interest in physical training.  And the formation of a school, significantly nicknamed that of “muscular Christianity,” implies a growing opinion that our present methods of bringing up children do not sufficiently regard the welfare of the body.  The topic is evidently ripe for discussion.

To conform the regimen of the nursery and the school to the established truths of modern science—­this is the desideratum.  It is time that the benefits which our sheep and oxen are deriving from the investigations of the laboratory, should be participated in by our children.  Without calling in question the great importance of horse-training and pig-feeding, we would suggest that, as the rearing of well-grown men and women is also of some moment, these conclusions which theory indicates and practice indorses, ought to be acted on in the last case as in the first.  Probably not a few will be startled—­perhaps offended—­by this collocation of ideas.  But it is a fact not to be disputed, and to which we must reconcile ourselves, that man is subject to the same organic laws as inferior creatures.  No anatomist, no physiologist, no chemist, will for a moment hesitate to assert, that the general principles which are true of the vital processes in animals are equally true of the vital processes in man.  And a candid admission of this fact is not without its reward:  namely, that the generalisations established by observation and experiment on brutes, become available for human guidance.  Rudimentary as is the Science of Life, it has already attained to certain fundamental principles underlying the development of all organisms, the human included.  That which has now to be done, and that which we shall endeavour in some measure to do, is to trace the bearings of these fundamental principles on the physical training of childhood and youth.

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The rhythmical tendency which is traceable in all departments of social life—­which is illustrated in the access of despotism after revolution, or, among ourselves, in the alternation of reforming epochs and conservative epochs—­which, after a dissolute age, brings an age of asceticism, and conversely,—­which, in commerce, produces the recurring inflations and panics—­which carries the devotees of fashion from one absurd extreme to the opposite one;—­this rhythmical tendency affects also our table-habits, and by implication, the dietary of the young.  After a period distinguished by hard drinking and hard eating, has come a period of comparative sobriety, which, in teetotalism and vegetarianism, exhibits extreme forms of protest against the riotous living of the past.  And along with this change in the regimen of adults, has come a parallel change in the