Edward Mussey Hartwell Principal Types of Physical Training Compared

Annotation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. In comparison with the five main types or national systems of exercise, mentioned above, all other schemes and so-called systems of physical education, seem to me, to be fragmentary, anomalous, and insufficient. Provided we apprehend the lessons of experience and the teachings of science with regard to the essential character and comparative worth of the results at tained by each of these national systems of bodily education, we shall be able to classify and criticise, with approximate justness, the numerous varied, and often fantastic, new and local schemes of exercise, whose inventors and partisans are on every hand clamoring loudly and insistently for recognition and patronage. I shall not consider them further, as it is not my purpose in these lectures to attempt to bolster up or pull down any local idol that has gained a hierarchy or worshippers for itself, either in this city or in the country at large.