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tion, then they may hope to see the race of pigmies give place to a generation of giants. Based upon an exact knowledge of the constitution of the parents, and foreseeing the dangers which will menace the child, proper physical education will indicate, in due time, the surest means of avoiding them. The varied nutrition, the changes of air, and water, and places, which our wonderful system of rail-roads puts at our disposal; the varied and skillful systems of exercise, the use of all these will enable us to regulate and to change the most deplorable hereditary taints. It is not claimed that vices of constitution can be thus entirely abolished, or that the puny children may be thus brought to the standard of the most robust, but we do claim that natural defects may be so far remedied that a condition of well-being and comparative comfort, as well as a wonderful prolongation of life, may be secured, and that, in a very few generations, these taints may be eradicated, and the race vastly improved.
With few exceptions, we are not born with the diseases with which our parents are afflicted, but only with a tendency to those diseases. These usually declare themselves at about the age at which our parents were first attacked. This affords time and ample warning to pursue such a judicious system of physical and mental training as shall almost certainly prevent them. For example: a child whose father died of consumption at the age of thirty-five, knows that whatever may be his physical conformation, he is at least liable to fall a victim to that disease between thirty and forty. Now, he has twenty or thirty years of preparation to avert a threatened calamity. Who can doubt what the result of a proper effort must be?
The "weakly systems" are not the only ones who suffer from the prevailing notions of education; the most robust
