Healthful outdoor sports and exercises have in the last few years grown to a remarkable vogue and popularity in this country. Their cultivation has indeed been one of the most notable social developments of the past quarter of a century. England has led the world in the various branches of athletics, and the general participation in them by her people has done much to make the English race distinguished among nations for the best standard of physical development. But already we are fairly dividing the honors with her. In yachting we have built the boats and reared the sailors that have outsailed, time and again, the best yachts England has ever produced. American riflemen and American oarsmen have held their own against the best talent of England. Even in cricket, their great national game, picked teams of Englishmen have been met and vanquished by transatlantic invaders. Of running, walking and bicycling records America holds her share, and of those for short distances she has the great majority. In high jumping, throwing the hammer and putting the weight, American athletes are in the lead. Tennis and polo are newer games here than in England, but our standards in them are of the highest. Baseball is peculiarly our own, and it has been developed to a wonderful degree of scientific skill reached by no other outdoor sport. “The pleasure of exercise,” says Dr. Holmes, “is due first to a purely physical impression, and secondly to a sense of power in action. The first source of pleasure varies, of course, with our condition, and the state of the surrounding circumstances; the second with the amount and kind of power, and the extent and kind of action. In all forms of active exercise there are three powers simultaneously in action—the will, the muscles and the intellect. Each of these predominates in different kinds of exercise.” The Autocrat discusses the relative merits of walking, riding and rowing, concluding with the statement that rowing “is the nearest approach to flying that man has ever made or perhaps ever will make. As the hawk sails without flapping his pinions, so you drift with the tide, when you will, in the most luxurious form of locomotion indulged to an embodied spirit. You can row easily and gently all day, and you can row yourself blind and black in the face in ten minutes, just as you like. It is in the boat, then, that man finds the largest extension of his volitional and muscular existence.” [Illustration: ON PARADE—A REPRESENTATIVE CLASS OF ONE OF NEW YORK’S RIDING SCHOOLS.] In a later edition of the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” from which the foregoing quotation is made, Dr. Holmes adds in a foot note: “Since the days when this was written, the bicycle has appeared as the rival of the wherry. The boat flies like a sea bird with its long, narrow, outstretched pinions; the bicycle rider, like feathered Mercury with his wings on his feet.” [Illustration: THE GIRL OF THE PERIOD CAN RIDE AS WELL AS DANCE.]