ATHLETIO SPORTS.

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§2.

The Absence of all Athletic Spokts — Loye of Music— The Parade-Ground on a Sdndat — Gambling —" coffee-drinkings" and balls.

No athletic or manly games are known among the inactiveadults and hardly less inert youths of the country.

The healthful exercise of cricket would require too muchexertion to be populär among a race who delight in crawlingabout at the pace of reptiles rather than men. For the samereason the people never indulge in the vigorous recreationof football or hockey. Nor are any such sports as those ofrackets, or bowls, or quoits known to the slow Deutschers.*

* We are inclined to believe that the habitual inactivity of the Prussianand Rhenish races proceeds from some organic defect peculiar to the people ; or,in other words, that their extraordinary want of energy has an internal origin,being merely increased rather than produced by such external causes as theim moderate use of tobacco and living in undrained houses and close unventilatedrooms.

The Deutschers are content to pass their lives in such places, because theyhave not naturally sufficient energy to clean and purify their dwellings ; andthey smoke to an inordinate extent, because smoking is essentially a sedentaryamusement, affording the mind just enough occupation in idleness to preventabsolute vacuity. Hence the Prussians are accustomed to fetid rooms andtobacco clouds because they are naturally inert, and they are rendered more inertthan they are by nature, owing to their indulgence in such narcotic poisons.

Now we would suggest, that the internal cause for this natural lack of energyon the part of the Germans may probably proceed from defective Organisationin that portion of the brain, whither all the motor nerves of the body are trace-able. It is well known to anatomists, that at the base of the cerebrum lie twolarge masses of nervous matter, called the Corpora striata and the thalamusoptici i and that the track of sensory nerves is found to end in the one, and thatof the motory nerves in the other. Hence it may be presumed that, accordingas the one or the other of these bodies is fully or imperfectly developed, or moreor less perfectly supplied with arterial blood, so must the sensory or motoryfunctions of the individual be more or less lively.

By such means we are enabled, not only to account physically for the

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