PHYSICAL SPLENDOR OF MODERN YOUTH.

Tuapeka Times, Volume XXV, Issue 4254, 3 July 1895, Page 4

PHYSICAL SPLENDOR OF MODERN YOUTH.

As I have no longer youth, I must be content with memory and experience, and I do not hesitate to say that when I look back upon the young men and women of forty and thirty years ago, I am amazed rather at the physical splendor and dashing energy of our young friends of to-day. The world seems to have filled with Apollos and Dianas ; cheap food and clothing, improved sanitation, athletics which bring temperance with them, frequent changes of air and scene, and a more scientific regulation of all habits, seem since my adolescence to have transformed middle-class youth ; and the change is rapidly spreading downwards. Women especially seem to be changed for the better. Freedom to live their own lives, and the enfranchisement of their faculties in a liberal education, which, physically put, means the development of their brains and nerves, so far from making women more whimsical or languid, seem not only to have given them' new cLarms and fresher and wider interests in life, but also to have promoted in them a more rapid and continuous flow of nervous spirits, and to have warmed and animated them with a new vitality both of body and miud. If athletic exercises and bodily labor enlarge and develope the muscular frame, why do we cry out in alarm that mental exercises and the extension of our nervous energies will destroy our brains ? At first sight surely we Bhould have a contrary apprehension. — Dr Allbutt, in " Contemporary Beyiewi"