The æsthetic gymnastic, which will serve as a diacatholicon and panacea for a perverted and sick generation, is one whose measured and curvilinear movements will not be wasteful of force but conservative of it, by keeping the molecular vibrations circulating in the organism in perpetual translations of their power, instead of shaking them out and losing them through sharp angles and shocks. This will develop the brain and nerves, the genius and character, as the old system developed the muscles and the viscera. It will lead to harmony, virtue, inspiration, and long life, as the old system led to exaggeration, lust, excess, and early death. How greatly it is needed one fact shows, namely, the steady process which has long been going on of lessening beauty and increasing ugliness in the higher classes of society, lessening roundness and increasing angularity of facial contour. The proof of this historic encroachment of anxious, nervous wear and tear displacing the full grace of curved lines with the sinister sharpness of straight lines is given in most collections of family portraits, and may be strikingly seen by glancing from the rosy and generous faces of Fox and Burke or of Washington and Hamilton to the pinched and wrinkled visages of Gladstone and D’Israeli or of Lincoln and Seward. There is probably only one man now living who is fully competent to construct this system of æsthetic gymnastic,—James Steele Mackaye, the heir of the traditions and the developer of the philosophy of François Delsarte. It was he of whom Forrest, two years before his own death, said, “He has thrown floods of light into my mind: in fifteen minutes he has given me a deeper insight into the philosophy of my own art than I had myself learned in fifty years of study.” If he shall die without producing this work, it will be a calamity to the world greater than the loss of any battle ever fought or the defeat of any legislative measure ever advocated. For this style of gymnastic alone recognizes the infinitely solemn and beautiful truth that every attitude, every motion, tends to _produce_ the quality of which it is the legitimate expression. Here is brought to light an education constantly going on in every one, and far more momentous and fatal than any other. Here is a principle which makes the body and the laws of mechanics as sacred revelations of the will of God as the soul and the laws of morality. Here is the basis of the new religious education destined to perfect the children of men, abolish deformity, sickness, and crime, and redeem the earth. Had Forrest practised such a style of exercise, instead of weighing upwards of two hundred pounds and suffering from those irregularities of circulation which often disabled, at length paralyzed, and at last killed him at sixty-seven, he would have weighed a hundred and sixty, been as free and agile as he was powerful, and lived without an ache or a shock to ninety or a hundred.