Apparatus for lifting is not yet introduced into most gymnasiums, in
spite of the recommendations of the Roxbury Hercules: beside the fear
of straining, there is the cumbrous weight and cost of iron apparatus,
while, for some reason or other, no cheap and accurate dynamometer has
yet come into the market. Running and jumping, also, have as yet been
too much neglected in our institutions, or practised spasmodically
rather than systematically. It is singular how little pains have been
taken to ascertain definitely what a man can do with his body,--far
less, as Quetelet has observed, than in regard to any animal which man
has tamed, or any machine which he has invented. It is stated, for
instance, in Walker's "Manly Exercises," that six feet is the maximum
of a high leap, with a run,--and certainly one never finds in the
newspapers a record of anything higher; yet it is the English tradition,
that Ireland, of Yorkshire, could clear a string raised fourteen feet,
and that he once kicked a bladder at sixteen. No spring-board would
explain a difference so astounding. In the same way, Walker fixes the
limit of a long leap without a run at fourteen feet, and with a run at
twenty-two,--both being large estimates; and Thackeray makes his young
Virginian jump twenty-one feet and three inches, crediting George
Washington with a foot more. Yet the ancient epitaph of Phayllus the
Crotonian claimed for him nothing less than fifty-five feet, on an
inclined plane. Certainly the story must have taken a leap also.

These ladders, aspiring indefinitely into the air, like Piranesi's
stairways, are called technically peak-ladders; and dear banished
T.S.K., who always was puzzled to know why Mount Washington kept up such
a pique against the sky, would have found his joke fit these ladders
with great precision, so frequent the disappointment they create. But
try them, and see what trivial appendages one's legs may become,--since