=The cult of muscle.=--A word must really be said here, in accordance with all the foregoing argument, against the recent revival of what may be called the Cult of Muscle. This cult of muscle, or belief in physical culture, so called, as the true means of race-culture, undoubtedly requires to have its absurd pretensions censured. We now have many flourishing schools of physical culture which desire to persuade us to a belief in the monstrous anachronism that, even in man, muscle and bone are still pre-eminent. They want as many people as possible to believe that the only thing really worth aiming at is what they understand by physical culture. They pride themselves upon knowing the names and positions of all the muscles in the body, and on being able to provide us with instruments to develop all these muscles: they are there and they ought to be developed, and you are a mere parody of what a man ought to be unless they are developed--none of them must be neglected. Many people have been persuaded of these doctrines, and there is no doubt that the physical culture schools do thus develop a large number of muscles which have no present service for man and would otherwise have been allowed to rest in a decent obscurity. In order to prove this point, let us instance a few muscles which it is utterly absurd to regard as still possessing any survival-value for man. In the sole of the foot there are four distinct layers of muscles, by means of which it is theoretically possible to turn each individual toe to the left or the right, independently of its neighbours, and to move the various parts of each toe upon themselves, just as in the case of the fingers. All this muscular apparatus is a mere survival, worth nothing at all for the special purposes of the human foot. In point of fact the human foot is now decadent, and probably not more than two or three specimens of feet in a hundred contain the complete normal equipment of muscles, bones and joints--as Sir William Turner showed many years ago. Thus many feet are possessed of muscles designed to act upon joints which have not been developed at all in the feet in question and which, if they were there, would not be of the smallest use. To take another instance, we do not now use our external ears for the purpose of catching sound, though we still possess muscles which, if thrown into action, would move the external ear in various directions. Again, there is a flat, thin stratum of muscle on the front of the neck, corresponding to a muscle which in the dog and the horse is quite important, but which is of no use to us. All would be agreed as to the absurdity of devoting continued conscious effort to the development of these particular muscles; but in point of fact we have a whole host of muscles which are in a similar case, and which are nevertheless objects of the most tender solicitude on the part of the physical culturist. In general, this modern craze, whilst highly