simple raising and
lowering of the heels. In less than four months he had increased
the girth of each calf one whole inch. When asked how many strokes
a day he averaged, he said that it was from fifteen hundred to two
thousand, varied some days by his holding in each hand, during the
process, a twelve-pound dumbbell, and then only doing one thousand
or thereabouts. The time he found most convenient was in the
morning on rising, and just before retiring at night. The work did
not take much time; seventy strokes a minute was found a good
ordinary rate, so that fifteen minutes at each end of the day was
all he needed.

We new recognize how silly are such exercises taken for the mere sake of
adding an inch or two to an already serviceable muscle.

PENNY-WISE AND POUND-FOOLISH

It is poor gymnastics when the main object is to expend a certain number
of foot-pounds of energy to secure increase in cardiac and pulmonary
activity, without care being taken that these organs are in a favorable
condition to meet the increased demand put upon them. It is poor
gymnastics if we desire to astound the world by nicely finished and
smoothly gliding combinations of complex movements fit to be put into
the repertoire of a juggler, or by exhibitions of strength vying with
those of a Sandow, if we do not take into consideration the effects upon
the vital functions.

"Look at these fellows," said the physician, "built like giants and
rotten inside!" True, he was speaking of a lot of big negroes, but he
found the same condition in others--men with stiff muscles and slow
movements, men with shoulders pulled forward and no chest expansion,
breathing wholly with their abdomens. As he put it, "Those men will
to-morrow be the recruits for another army, the one which fills the
tuberculosis hospitals."

NATURE'S PROCESS

What we want is suppleness, chest expansion, resistive force, and
endurance; and these do not come from great bulging knots of muscle nor
from extraordinary feats of strength. Rapid shifts from severe training
to a life of ease and indulgence is not Nature's process. It is not the
way in which she carries on her work. Every step she makes is a little
one. She seems never to reckon time as an essential in her economy. We
should heed the lesson. The man who eats, drinks, and neglects all care
of himself for a year, and then rushes madly into a period of severe
physical exerci