p. 24 | Physical Education

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 30, 1873

Physical Education.

Perhaps not the least advantage which is derived from muscular, active exercise, as opposed to passive exercise—by which we refer to a ride in a carriage, or a sail in a vessel, in which latter case the abdominal muscles are the only ones actively exercised—is cleanliness. We mention this as it has been little insisted on by the advocates of gymnastic training. It belongs rather, perhaps, to a treatise on medicinal than on athletic gymnastics; but the two are at the present day, as we have said, happily incorporated. A microscope will show the millions of drains with which the skin is perforated, for the sake of voiding effete matter. This effete matter can only be thrown off by perspiration, produced by exercise. If it is not thrown off, it is absorbed into the system, and diseases, particularly consumption, and premature death are the result. The result is produced by the canals of the skin becoming clogged, which not only prevents the refuse matter from coming out, but also prevents oxygen, which is essential to life, from coming in. We do not breathe with the lungs only, consuming carbon and other matter, and renewing the blood with oxygen as it passes through them. The skin also is a respiratory organ; some animals have no lungs, and breathe entirely with the skin; others, with a portion of the skin modified into gills, or rudimentary lungs. In animals of a higher grade, though the lungs are the instruments principally devoted to this function, the skin retains it still to such an extent that to interfere with its pores is highly dangerous; but to arrest their operation, fatal. The breathing of the skin may be easily proved by the simple experiment of placing the hand in a basin of cold water, when it will be soon covered by minute bubbles of carbonic acid. But a more complete and scientific proof is afforded by inserting it in a vessel of oxygen, when the gas will, after a short interval of time, be replaced by carbonic acid. “We all know,” says Dr. Brereton, “from daily experience, the intimate sympathy which exists between the skin and lungs, and when we are walking fast, how much more easily we get along after having broken out into a perspiration; if we are riding, our horse freshens up under the same condition.” In these homely words, he is indirectly proving the chief sanitary characteristic of medicinal gymnastics.

We have most of us heard of the story of the unfortunate child who, to add solemnity and symbolic happiness to the inauguration of Leo X. as pope of Rome, was gilded over at Florence, to represent the Golden Age. The career of that child so conditioned was brilliant, but brief. It, of course, died in a few hours. One of the reasons of the greater danger of extensive burns or scalds compared with others smaller, though deeper, is the fact that the former exclude a greater surface of skin from the oxygen of the air. M. Fourcault, a distinguished French physiologist, whose admiration of science appears to have led him to care little for the infliction of torture on other animals than himself, sacrificed a great number of Guinea pigs, rabbits, and cats, by varnishing over the whole of their skin, contemplating with satisfaction the invariable result—death—as a demonstrative proof that the skin breathes. One word more. It has been imagined that gymnastic exercise is exclusively profitable to the young. It is not so; it is of advantage, of great advantage likewise to the old. Young persons—we include, of course, women, and wish that calisthenics, which we suppose to be a species of female gymnastics, were more systematized and popular—need little exhortation to exercise, since, by nature, motion is their chief desire; but they stand in need of advice and moderation, since, as they do everything immoderately, so they are accustomed to take too much exercise, and of an improper character, a course of proceeding not without danger. On the contrary, with older men, the increasing weight of the body, and the loss of the so-called “animal spirits,” induces the desire of repose, and they need an increase of exercise beyond that which inclination enjoins on them. Thus they are brought within the province of the gymnastic code.—Cornhill Magazine