of origin,--unites German
gymnastics with English sports and sparring, and takes the red Indians
for instructors in paddling and running. With these various aptitudes,
we certainly ought to become a nation of athletes.

We have shown, that, in one way or another, American schoolboys obtain
active exercise. The same is true, in a very limited degree, even
of girls. They are occasionally, in our larger cities, sent to
gymnasiums,--the more the better. Dancing-schools are better than
nothing, though all the attendant circumstances are usually unfavorable.
A fashionable young lady is estimated to traverse her three hundred
miles a season on foot; and this needs training. But out-door exercise
for girls is terribly restricted, first by their costume, and secondly
by the remarks of Mrs. Grundy. All young female animals unquestionably
require as much motion as their brothers, and naturally make as much
noise; but what mother would not be shocked, in the case of her girl of
twelve, by one-tenth part the activity and uproar which are recognized
as being the breath of life to her twin brother? Still, there is a
change going on, which is tantamount to an admission that there is an
evil to be remedied. Twenty years ago, if we mistake not, it was by no
means considered "proper" for little girls to play with their hoops
and balls on Boston Common; and swimming and skating have hardly been
recognized as "ladylike" for half that period of time.

Still it is beyond question, that far more out-door exercise is
habitually taken by the female population of almost all European
countries than by our own. In the first place, the peasant women of all
other countries (a class non-existent here) are trained to active
labor from childhood; and what traveller has not seen, on foreign
mountain-paths, long rows of maidens ascending and descending the
difficult ways, bearing heavy burdens on their heads, and winning by the
exercise such a superb symmetry and grace of figure as were a new wonder
of the world to Cisatlantic eyes? Among the higher classes, physical
exercises take the place of these things. Miss Beecher glowingly
describes a Russian female seminary in which nine hundred girls of the
noblest families were being trained by Ling's system of calisthenics,
and her informant declared that she never beheld such an array of
girlish health and beauty. Englishwomen, again, have horsemanship and
pedestrianism, in which their ordinary feats appear