ONE SECRET OF RIGHT LIVING.
A LARGE number of professors of athletics, or athletic professors, met recently in the gymnasium of the Adelphi Academy, Brooklyn, to teach the human race how to keep well and live forever. On the subject of physical exercise most people are fools. A man without a muscle is as badly off in this rough and tumble world as a man without a brain. Parents take pride in their children when their heads are packed, like a pawnbroker's shop, with all sorts of odds and ends of information, but they do too little to encourage the symmetrical development of their bodies. They forget that robust health constitutes about three-quarters of the problem of human happiness, and that it is criminal neglect of the boy and girl to keep them at their books until they lose all appetite for out-of-door sports. Half the men in the world are broken down with dyspepsia, and the other half are broken up with rheumatism. The women, who are not supposed to have any muscles, indulge in the luxuries of sick headache and neuralgia. A half hour's vigorous exercise in the morning before the business of the day begins, a brisk walk of a dozen miles, would sweeten the temper and make life worth living. Such is our physical condition, however, that if you should turn the gentlemen of Wall Street into a gymnasium for an hour's torture with the parallel bars and fifty-pound dumb-bells and the inspiring trapeze, you would have to pick them up from the floor like chestnuts under a tree after a gale of wind. Our clerks and their employers also, after a three hours' trot on a hard road, with a leap here and there over a fence or ditch, would have to be brought home in furniture wagons and a large proportion of them deposited at the undertaker's. We have not yet learned the secret of right living. No man lives well who does not spend hours every day out-of-doors. We are asthmatic, rheumatic, spleeny, and hard to get along with at home because we believe in brains and not in bodies.—New York Herald.