Opening of the book
HOW TO GET STRONG
AND
HOW TO STAY SO
BY
WILLIAM BLAIKIE
NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
FRANKLIN SQUARE
1883.
[p.2]Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year
1879, by
HARPER & BROTHERS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
[p.3]TO
ARCHIBALD MACLAREN
WHO HAS PROBABLY DONE MORE THAN ANY ONE ELSE NOW LIVING TO
POINT OUT THE BENEFITS RESULTING FROM RATIONAL PHYSICAL
EXERCISE, AND HOW TO ATTAIN THOSE BENEFITS
THIS BOOK IS RESPECTFULLY
Dedicated
PREFACE.
Millions of our people pass their lives in cities and towns, and at work which keeps them nearly all day indoors. Many hours are devoted for days and years, under careful teachers, and many millions of dollars are spent annually, in educating the mind and the moral nature. But the body is allowed to grow up all uneducated; indeed, often such a weak, shaky affair that it gets easily out of order, especially in middle and later life, and its owner is wholly unequal to tasks which would have proved easy to him, had he given it even a tithe of the education bestowed so generously in other directions. Not a few, to be sure, have the advantage in youth of years of active out-door life on a farm, and so lay up a store of vigor which stands them in good stead throughout a lifetime. But many, and especially those born and reared in towns and cities, have had no such training, or any equivalent, and so never have the developed lungs and muscles, the strong heart and vigorous digestion—in short, the improved tone and strength in all their vital organs—which any sensible plan of body-culture, followed up daily, would have secured. It does not matter so much whether we get vigor on the farm, the deck, the tow-path, or in the gymnasium, if we only get it. Fortunately, if not gotten in youth,
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