ninety-eight pounds; and it was considered an astonishing feat, when,
a little earlier, Mr. Richard Montgomery used to "put up" a dumb-bell
weighing one hundred and one pounds. A good many persons, in different
parts of the country, now handle one hundred and twenty-five, and Dr.
Windship has got much farther on. There is, of course, a knack in
using these little articles, as in every other feat, yet it takes good
extensor muscles to get beyond the fifties. The easiest way of elevating
the weight is to swing it up from between the knees; or it may be thrown
up from the shoulder, with a simultaneous jerk of the whole body; but
the only way of doing it handsomely is to put it up from the shoulder
with the arm alone, without bending the knee, though you may bend the
body as much as you please. Dr. Windship now puts up one hundred and
forty-one pounds in this manner, and by the aid of a jerk can elevate
one hundred and eighty with one arm. This particular movement with
dumb-bells is most practised, as affording a test of strength; but there
are many other ways of using them, all exceedingly invigorating, and all
safe enough, unless the weight employed be too great, which it is very
apt to be. Indeed, there is so much danger of this, that at Cambridge it
has been deemed best to exclude all beyond seventy pounds. Nevertheless,
the dumb-bell remains the one available form of home or office exercise:
it is a whole athletic apparatus packed up in the smallest space; it is
gymnastic pemmican. With one fifty-pound dumb-bell, or a pair of half
that size--or more or less, according to his strength and habits,--a
man may exercise nearly every muscle in his body in half an hour, if he
has sufficient ingenuity in positions. If it were one's fortune to be
sent to prison,--and the access to such retirement is growing more and
more facile in many regions of our common country,--one would certainly
wish to carry a dumb-bell with him, precisely as Dr. Johnson carried an
arithmetic in his pocket on his tour to the Hebrides, as containing the
greatest amount of nutriment in the compactest form.