me
danger of excess. Dr. Windship approves of exercising only every other
day in the gymnasium; but as most persons take their work in a more
diluted form than his, they can afford to repeat it daily, unless warned
by headache or languor that they are exceeding their allowance. There
is no good in excess; our constitutions cannot be hurried. The law is
universal, that exercise strengthens as long as nutrition balances it,
but afterwards wastes the very forces it should increase. We cannot make
bricks faster than Nature supplies us with straw.

It is one good evidence of the increasing interest in these exercises,
that the American gymnasiums built during the past year or two have far
surpassed all their predecessors in size and completeness, and have
probably no superiors in the world. The Seventh Regiment Gymnasium in
New York, just opened by Mr. Abner S. Brady, is one hundred and eighty
feet by fifty-two, in its main hall, and thirty-five feet in height,
with nearly a thousand pupils. The beautiful hall of the Metropolitan
Gymnasium, in Chicago, measures one hundred and eight feet by eighty,
and is twenty feet high at the sides, with a dome in the centre, forty
feet high, and the same in diameter. Next to these probably rank the
new gymnasium at Cincinnati, the Tremont Gymnasium at Boston, and the
Bunker-Hill Gymnasium at Charlestown, all recently opened. Of college
institutions the most complete are probably those at Cambridge and New
Haven,--the former being eighty-five feet by fifty, and the latter one
hundred feet by fifty, in external dimensions. The arrangements for
instruction are rather more systematic at Harvard, but Yale has several
valuable articles of apparatus--as the rack-bars and the series
of rings--which have hardly made their appearance, as yet, in
Massachusetts, though considered indispensable in New York.

Gymnastic exercises are as yet but very sparingly introduced into our
seminaries, primary or professional, though a great change is already
beginning. Frederick the Great complained of the whole Prussian
school-system of his day, because it assumed that men were originally
created for students and clerks, whereas his Majesty argued that the
very shape of the human body rather proved them to be meant by Nature
for postilions. Until lately all our educational plans have assumed man
to be a merely sedentary being; we have employed teachers of music and
drawing to go from school to school to teach t