individual with a wooden leg, which he takes off at the commencement
of affairs, thus economizing weight and stowage, and performing
achievements impossible except to unipeds.

In the enthusiasm created by this emulation, there is necessarily some
danger of excess. Dr. Windship approves of exercising only every other
day in the gymnasium; but as most persons take their work in a more
diluted form than his, they can afford to repeat it daily, unless warned
by headache or languor that they are exceeding their allowance. There
is no good in excess; our constitutions cannot be hurried. The law is
universal, that exercise strengthens as long as nutrition balances it,
but afterwards wastes the very forces it should increase. We cannot make
bricks faster than Nature supplies us with straw.

It is one good evidence of the increasing interest in these exercises,
that the American gymnasiums built during the past year or two have far
surpassed all their predecessors in size and completeness, and have
probably no superiors in the world. The Seventh Regiment Gymnasium in
New York, just opened by Mr. Abner S. Brady, is one hundred and eighty
feet by fifty-two, in its main hall, and thirty-five feet in height,
with nearly a thousand pupils. The beautiful hall of the Metropolitan
Gymnasium, in Chicago, measures one hundred and eight feet by eighty,
and is twenty feet high at the sides, with a dome in the centre, forty
feet high, and the same in diameter. Next to these probably rank the
new gymnasium at Cincinnati, the Tremont Gymnasium at Boston, and the
Bunker-Hill Gymnasium at Charlestown, all recently opened. Of college
institutions the most complete are probably those at Cambridge and New
Haven,--the former being eighty-five feet by fifty, and the latter one
hundred feet by fifty, in external dimensions. The arrangements for
instruction are rather more systematic at Harvard, but Yale has several