It is because the brain is developed, while the muscles are allowed to grow flabby and atrophied, that the deplored chasm between knowing and doing is so often fatal to the practical effectiveness of mental and moral culture. The great increase of city and sedentary life has been far too sudden for the human body--which was developed by hunting, war, agriculture, and manifold industries now given over to steam and machinery--to adapt itself healthfully or naturally to its new environment. Let any of us take down an anatomical chart of the human muscles, and reflect what movements we habitually make each day, and realize how disproportionately our activities are distributed compared with the size or importance of the muscles, and how greatly modern specialization of work has deformed our bodies. The muscles that move the scribbling pen are insignificant fraction of those in the whole body, and those that wag the tongue and adjust the larynx are also comparatively few and small. Their importance is, of course, not underrated, but it is disastrous to concentrate education upon them too exclusively or too early in life. The trouble is that few realize what physical vigor is in man or woman, or how dangerously near weakness often is to wickedness, how impossible healthful energy of will is without strong muscles which are its organ, or how endurance and self-control, no less than great achievement, depend on muscle-habits. Both in Germany and Greece, a golden age of letters was preceded, by about a generation, by a golden age of national gymnastic enthusiasm which constitutes, especially in the former country, one of the most unique and suggestive chapters in the history of pedagogy. Symmetry and grace, hardihood and courage, the power to do everything that the human body can do with and without all conceivable apparatus, instruments, and even tools, are culture ideals that in Greece, Rome, and Germany respectively have influenced, as they might again influence, young men, as intellectual ideals never can do save in a select few. We do not want "will-virtuosos," who perform feats hard to learn, but then easy to do and good for show; nor spurtiness of any sort which develops an erethic habit of work, temper, and circulation, and is favored by some of our popular sports but too soon reacts into fatigue. Even will-training does not reach its end till it leads the young up to taking a intelligent, serious and life-long interest in their own physical culture and development. This is higher than interest in success in school or college sport; and, though naturally later than these, is one of the earliest forms of will-culture in which it is safe and wise to attempt to interest the young for its own sake alone. In our exciting life and trying climate, in which the experiment of civilization has never been tried before, these thoughts are merely exercises.