Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 April 1878 — Partial Muscular Development. [ARTICLE]

Partial Muscular Development.

Any careful observer, passing along our busier thoroughfares, or happening intb v Hny country town on market-day, or anywhere else where men congregate, can hardly have failed to notice that while there arc many strong ones and many hearty ones, there arc very few who are either thoroughly erect or well-proportioned throughout. And when it is remembered that the large majority of men in this country are sous of farmers, merchants, mechanics, or laborers, it is not difficult to accouht for this onc-sidedness of build and indifferentcarriage. For, while the fanner’s work is vigorous and in the open air, far the greater part of it, and especially the harder part of it, instantly uses his back, and does but little for his front, and particularly for the front of his chest. Mowing stoops him over and rounds his back; so do spading, and hoeing, and weeding, and lifting of nearly every sort. His back grows thick and strong, perhaps massive; so do some of the muscles of his arms, of his abdomen, and of his legs, until they soou so outstrip the others that his spine, getting once crooked from being so long ana so firmly held in one position, never gets out of it day or night While his whole Work strengthens, it also stiffens him. Ho is seldom a good walker, the habit of always hitching up, though the errand is to a place hardly a mile away, contributing to this stiffness, found, as it usually is, with an inerect position as he rides, so unlike, by-the-way, that which is so common among the English stage-drivers, who elicited praise from Emerson for their dignified grandfatherly air. Few of the mechanic arts are any more favorable to symmetrical development and uprightness of carriage. The blacksmith, like the farmer, works some muscles tremendously; those of his hands, cf one of his shoulders and of one of his arms, for instance; but his legs are often indifferent, and his loins nothing great, while, in common

with hosts of mechanics, his work is not done in the open air. Painters and plasterers have good wrists; carpenters plane and saw and drive nails well with their right hands; masons, with backs bent, lift heavy stones, which, with one of their hands, they have ohiselod into shape for their purpose; shoemakers hoop their hacks rather more successfully than any other trado; and tho jewelers, compositors, designers, and all who do the finer, Itghter work, would never, merely by their daily toil, develop into well-built, erect men if they kept at it for a thousand yoars. Men in mercantile life Bit or stand many hours each day, are frequently burdened with important and trying work, have so many irons in the fire as to get no rest, and at the end of the day find themselves thoroughly exhausted, and in humor for anything but vigorous muscular exertion. If their work calls them out much, it uses their legs only, leaving the Arms idle, and so keeping the development but Eartial. The spade, tho pick and the ar of the laboring-man keep him stooped over in spite of all he can do, and ne lives and dies, as Charles Reade described him in his admirable sketch of the brave blind swimmer of the Scottish firth, James Lambert —a man with a slouch in his gait.— William Blaikic, in Harper's Magazine for Mag.