Review of Dental Literature and Art. [Volume: 2, Issue: 6, January, 1861, pp. 334-344]

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TILE DENTAL COSMOS.

pensable condition and necessary basis of all education for any earthly
purpose. Of what use are the brightest intellect and the richest stores
of knowledge, with a dyspeptic stomach, shattered nerves, and a fagged,
oppressed or distempered brain?
"It is true that physical education, for the most part, will take care of
itself, if you only leave it a fair and free opportunity. It needs no great
public institutions, no combined efforts or expensive arrangements. If
the child and the youth are sufficiently left to themselves, nature will generally secure their physical training. This may not, indeed, always be
the case; and sometimes, especially in crowded cities, some special guidance, or urging, or apparatus may be necessary. But that it is so generally the case, is probably the chief reason why physical education is so
much lost sight of, and so often and grievously encroached upon. Our
schools and literary institutions may not, it is true, be called upon to furnish any special apparatus or drill for physical education; but they are
bound so to limit and adjust their daily and weekly demands upon the
intellectual application of the pupil as to leave him sufficient time, and
sufficient cerebral energy, for due attention to his physical development
and well-being;-and, I think, they are bound also to urge upon him the
necessity of this attention as one of their most familiar and important lessons. I think that in this country, and in these later times, our zeal for
precocious intellectual development has led to some serious practical errors
in this particular. Our hot-bed intellectual culture will end in an intellectual, as well as physical debility and atrophy. In this the English are
wiser than we. Their educational arrangements are so made as to encourage a robust physical development, as well as high intellectual attainments.
The result is, that there is not, probably, in the world a finer race of men,
physically, than the educated nobility and gentry of England. So, too,
with the ancient Greeks and Romans. With them, the athlete and the
philosopher went side by side, and were sometimes identified in the same
person. They achieved their greatness almost as much by their physical
as by their intellectual culture. National power and military greatness
obviously depend upon it as their indispensable condition. Our tendency,
especially in great cities, is, to separate the physical and intellectual, so
that one class may have all of the one, and another all of the other. But
this is neither well, nor wise, nor safe. We should rather seek to combine
them as much as possible. Thus the intellectual power would be more
efficient, and the brute force less dangerous. The intellectual needs the
physical in order to achieve its greatest victories. It is not the giant
intellect alone that bears off the palm in the struggles of the forum or of
the senate, in professional life or in the political arena; but the well-knit
frame, the iron nerve, and the power of unlimited tension and physical
endurance.
" We may affect to despise the mere body and mere physical training
as much as we will; but, after all, a strong and fair proportioned human
form, a well-developed physical frame, nervous, muscular, vigorous, agile,
swelling with fresh life and ready for action at every point, is a magnificent sight; and the spontaneous, popular homage paid to such men as
Heenan and Sayers-which we are apt to look upon with so much disgust,
and, erroneously, to regard as a mark of the degeneracy of the age-is
an expression-rude, one-sided, and extravagant no doubt-yet an expression of nature and of truth. We do well to give heed to the lesson
which it teaches us."