Litchfield enquirer., 1878-07-04

PARTIAL MUSCULAR DEVELOPMENT Any careful observer, passing along our buster thoroughfares, or happening into. any country town on market-day, or any where else where men congregate, can hardly have failed to notice that while there are many strong ones and many hearty ones, there are very few who are either thoroughly erect or we'll pro- portioned throughout. And when it is re- membered that the large majority of men in this country are sons of farmers, merchants, mechanics, or laborers, it is not difficult to ac- count for this one sidedness of build and in- different carriage. For, while the farmers work is vigorous and in the open air, far the greater part of it, constantly uses his back, and does but little for his front, and particular ly for the front of his chest Moving stoops him over and rounds his back SO do spading, and hoeing, and wedding, 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 soon so outstrip the others that his spine, getting once crooked from being SC long and so firmly held in one position, never gets out of it day or night. While his whole work strengthens, it also stiffens him. He is seldom good walker, the habit of always hitching up, though the errand is to place hardly a mile away, contributing tothis stiffness, found, as it usually is, with an inerect position as he rides, so unlike, by-the-way that which is so common amoung the English stage-drivers, who elcited praise from Emerson for their dignifed grandfatherly air.
 Few of the mechanic arts are any more fa- verable to symmetrical development and up- rightness of carriage. The blacksmith, like the farmer, works some muscles tremendously; those of his hands, of 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 me- chanics, his work is not done in the open air. Painters and plasterers have good wrists car penters plane and saw and drive nails we'll with their right hands; masons, with backs bent, lift heavy stones, which with one of their hands, they have chiselled into shape for their purpose; oe-makers hoop their backs rather more successfully than any other trade and the jewellers, compositors, designers, and all who do the finer, lighter work, would never, merely by their daily toll, develop into we'll built, erect men if they kept at it for thous- and years, Men in mercantile life sit or stand many hours each day. are frequently burnen- ed 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 hunor for any thing but vigorous muscular exertion. If their work calls them out much, it uses their legs only, leaving the arms idle, and so keeping the de- velopment but partial. The spade, the pick and the bar of the laboring man keep nim stopped over in spite of all he can do, and he lives and dies, as Charles Reade described him in his admirable sketch of the brave blind swimmer of the Scottish firth, James Lam bert-a man with a slouch in his gait.-WIL- LIAM BLAIKIE, in Ha1pes's Magozine .tog May.