produce graceful carriage and healthy tone of the body. j According to Plato, the sophist Prodicus first pointed out the connexion between gymnastics and health. Having found such exercises beneficial to his own weak health, he formulated a method which was adopted generally, and which Hippocrates improved on. Galen lays the greatest stress on the proper use of gymnastics, and throughout ancient medical writers we find that special exercises are prescribed as the cure for special diseases. The regulation of the gymnasium at Athens is attributed by Pausanias (i. 39, 3) to Theseus ; Solon made several laws on the subject ; but, according to Galen, it was reduced to a system in the time of Clisthenes. Ten gymnasiarchs, one from each tribe, were appointed annually. These performed in rotation the duties of their office, which were to maintain and pay the persons that were training for public contests, to conduct the games at the great Athenian festivals, to exercise general supervision over the morals of the youths (they could, for example, remove any philosopher whose teaching they thought injurious), and to adorn and keep up the gymnasium. This office was one of the ordinary Aeirovpyiat, and great expense was entailed on the holders. Under them were ten sophronistae, with a salary of a drachma per day. Their duty was to watch the conduct of the youths at all times, and especially to be present at all their games. The practical teaching and selecting of the suitable exercises for each youth were in the hands of the poedotribse and gyoinastae. The latter also superin tended the effect on the constitution of the pupils, and prescribed for them when they were unwell. Aliptse oiled and rubbed dust on the bodies of the youths, acted as
surgeons, and administered the drugs prescribed.The gymnasia built to suit these various purposes were large buildings which contained, not merely places for each kind of exercise, but also a stadium, baths, covered porticos for practice in bad weather, and outer porticos where the philosophers and men of letters read public lectures and held disputations. In Athens there were three great public gymnasia, Academy, Lyceum, and Cynosarges, and every Greek city of consequence seems to have possessed one. Ruins of them exist at Pergamus, Ephesus, Alexandria in Troas, &c., from which, and from the accounts of Vitruvius (v. 11), it would appear that all were constructed on much the same plan. The details will be found most clearly given in Rich s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Much of the healthy buoyant elasticity of mind for which the Greek race is remarkable, as well as the active and beautiful physical development which no other race has ever equalled, is due to the love of gymnastics. The plastic art also owes its perfection in the treatment of the human form to the constant opportunity which artists had of observing the nude body in various attitudes. But abuses were liable to occur. The careful provisions made by Solon and later legislators to keep up the moral character of the gymnasia did not prevent them from fostering the vice which appears so much in Groek life. Though intro duced in Rome, where Nero built the first public gymnasium, gymnastics did not suit Italian habits, and never became popular.
Gymnasium, in its modern use, generally signifies a school for gymnastic exercises, but it is sometimes used also to denote a higher school intended to give immediate pre paration for the universities. The latter application of the term is specially prevalent in Germany.
GYMNASTICS, in the general acceptation of the term, denotes every exercise which tends to develop and invigorate the bodily powers, such as walking, running, riding, fencing, rowing, skating, dancing, and many others. In another sense gymnastics includes those manly and healthful games which have been encouraged by all high-minded nations as calculated to improve the physical strength and keep alive the martial spirit of their people. In a more limited sense, the term has been employed to denote the modern system of bodily exercises. Physical strength was the veritable god of antiquity, and we therefore find the elements of a system of gymnastics in most nations from the earliest times. In the infancy of society, when the individual was valued according to his personal strength and prowess, it was only natural that the utmost care should be bestowed on those arts which most surely led to distinction. All education then consisted chiefly in the practice of such exercises as were best calculated to develop muscular strength and make the tenure of life as secure as possible. The first gymnastic exercises, both of those nations that reached the highest civilization and of bar barians, were the same, viz., running, leaping, swimming, and the throwing of missiles. These exercises were at a very remote period systematized and reduced to a science by the Greeks (see Gymnasium). Among the Romans of the republic, the games in the Campus Martius, the duties of camp life, and the preliminary military exercises to which the soldier devoted himself, besides the enforced marches which were imposed upon him, and the part he took in the erection of public edifices, served to take the place of the gymnastic exercises required by the Greeks. In the Middle Ages, chivalry with its jousts, its feats of horsemanship, and encouragement to the arts of fencing, single stick, etc., took the place of the ancient gymnastic exercises. The invention of gunpowder, which modified the system of warfare, and the increasing value of indi vidual life, in a word, the progress of civilization closed the career of the champions and votaries of phy sical strength, and gymnastic exercises in the course of time were neglected. Rousseau, in his jmile, was the first to call attention to the injurious consequences of such indifference ; and it is in a large measure to his eloquent appeals that gymnastics have in recent times been held to constitute an integral part of school education, although it cannot be said that in every country the practical application of his views has met with much success. The good effects of the innovation which he advocated have nowhere been more strikingly exemplified than in Germany. When many parts of that country groaned under the iron yoke of Napoleon, Jahn and his followers, encouraged by the Prussian minister Stein, were establishing Turnpldtze or gymnastic schools, from which issued the well-trained youth who in due time drove the French legions across the Rhine.
Of late years public attention has been drawn to the increasing deterioration in the physique of the population of England, and several proposals have been put forward to check an evil which can no longer be concealed. These proposals may be arranged under the banners of two rival camps. The one maintains the opinion put forward in a work just published on exercise and training, in the follow ing words (Exercise and Training, 1878):—
" In our opinion the natural varieties of exercise of cricket, foot ball, and rowing for boys, hunting, shooting, &c. , formc-n, pursued at the different seasons of the year, are quite sufficient for a proper development of all parts of the body, in accordance with the uses of the different limbs, for the development of special muscles ; or, where a great variety of exercise cannot be procured, a system of gymnastics may be pursued. To the advocates for the adoption of systematic physical education by means of gymnasia at our schools, whilst we concede the immense value of such establishments in our large towns, where outdoor exercise and field sports are difficult of attainment, or in cases where from the physical debility the muscles have to be gradually developed, still we maintain that the national games played by the English schoolboy are infinitely superior to any system of ai tificial exercise ever devised.
