muscles, if not to ruin the muscles themselves. It is also most important to see that the exercise for each muscle shall be that for which the muscle is naturally adapted; and exercises designed to bring the muscles of the fingers or wrists into their utmost state of efficiency will be evidently utterly different from those by which we cultivate the muscles of the loins, the back, or the chest. For fingers and wrists are obviously designed (and are regularly used) for far more rapid movement than the muscles of the back, loins, or chest, and to attempt to make these larger muscle areas work with the same rapidity as the fingers attain in piano playing, is to give not only an impossible task, but a most unsuitable one. Or again, to try to accustom the fingers to sustain the weight borne every moment by the muscles of the neck would even, if it were possible, utterly unfit them for the rapid movements which are natural to them. Again, the muscles of the legs are designed to bear and to move the whole weight of the body, and it is thus obvious that exercises suitable for development of the arms may be highly unsuitable for the development of the legs, which from their greater natural bulk (designed for the continual shifting and sustaining of weight) are not able to move with the flick of the wrist. And it is here also that dumb-bells and indeed gymnastics generally seem to us to go wrong. It is to the arms in dumb-bell exercise that all this slow weight-moving is assigned, while really the essence of gymnastics seems to be to treat the arms like legs, and let them bear the whole weight of the body either passive or in motion. Thus it appears to us a truer and more sensible way of exercise to give each muscle, as far as may be, the kind of work for which it was intended: to give to the wrists, fingers, forearms, exercises of great speed, to give to the muscles of the legs exercises of speed certainly (but of less speed, since they are weight-carriers), of balance and of flexibility (thus enabling the body to start quickly in any required direction) and of sustaining power, to give to the big areas of muscle round the spine, abdomen and loins exercises that will enable them to do more easily their pillar-like work, and allow the underlying organs of the body free play, to give to the muscles of the ribs and chest that power of expansion and contraction which will enable the lungs to breathe fully at all times, and in emergency quickly, so that when greater demands are made by the working body for supplies of oxygen, they may be readily supplied without a struggle for breath. And if these things are possible--as we entirely believe--we hold that the man who has attained them through exercise will be a greater debtor to exercise than he who can lift large weights with limbs required for other purposes.