attractive to them, on any large scale, and with any permanency. Girls,
no doubt, learn as readily as boys to row, to skate, and to swim,--any
muscular inferiority being perhaps counterbalanced in swimming by
their greater physical buoyancy, in skating by their dancing-school
experience, and in rowing by their music-lessons enabling them more
promptly to fall into regular time,--though these suggestions may all be
fancies rather than facts. The same points help them, perhaps, in the
lighter calisthenic exercises; but when they come to the apparatus, one
seldom sees a girl who takes hold like a boy: it, perhaps, requires a
certain ready capital of muscle, at the outset, which they have not at
command, and which it is tedious to acquire afterwards. Yet there seem
to be some cases, as with the classes of Mrs. Molineaux at Cambridge,
where a good deal of gymnastic enthusiasm is created among female
pupils, and it may be, after all, that the deficiency lies thus far in
the teachers.

Experience is already showing that the advantages of school-gymnasiums
go deeper than was at first supposed. It is not to be the whole object
of American education to create scholars or idealists, but to produce
persons of a solid strength,--persons who, to use the most expressive
Western phrase that ever was coined into five monosyllables, "will do to
tie to"; whereas to most of us it would be absurd to tie anything but
the Scriptural millstone. In the military school of Brienne, the only
report appended to the name of the little Napoleon Bonaparte was "Very
healthy"; and it is precisely this class of boys for whom there is least
place in a purely intellectual institution. A child of immense animal
activity and unlimited observing faculties, personally acquainted with
every man, child, horse, dog, in the township,--intimate in the families
of oriole and grasshopper, pickerel and turtle,--quick of hand and
eye,--in short, born for practical leadership and victory,--such a boy