WHY MEN SHOULD EXERICSE DAILY
who treated an engine of yours in that way; would be discharged before Saturday night; yet the most important engine to you;—one of surpassing fitness for its work, if rightly handled; one that should outlast, and will outlast any device man's highest ingenuity has yet made, or even thought of,—you, its only engineer, treat in a way that you should check as swiftly as you would snatch the tiller of your yacht from a drunken sailor, who was driving you right upon the rocks. The strongest boy and youth we knew in our school-days; coming up to be a magnificent man; half an inch under six feet in height; superbly built; and weighing one hundred and ninety pounds of the best material; a strong, fearless, staying man, and of good habits, who looked as if he would out-last even a Brougham or a Gladstone; breaks down and dies at fifty. His friends say that, for a year or two past, he had looked anæmic; and that the cause was cancer of the bowels. But they also say that, inert, he had, for years, seldom taken exercise enough to even start the perspiration. But a writer in the American Encyclopædia says:
"Gymnastics—Active nutrition of the muscles also is unfavorable to the deposition of morbid matters, such as are found in tuberculous, cancerous, or scrofulous constitutions."
And he well adds:
"There is no doubt that judicious and habitual exercise favours the elimination of effete matters from the organism, particularly by the lungs, skin, and kidneys; increases the activity of the nutrition of the muscular system, rendering the food more relishing, more easily digested, and better assimilated; and develops nerve-power.
"One hour's honest exercise, followed by ablution, will usually suffice for the brain-worker; and this should produce prompt reaction, without a sense of exhaustion. Persons who take this amount of judicious exercise are often more powerful, and have more endurance than the hard-worked laborer."
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