Morning journal and courier., 1889-06-27
WOMEN AS SWImmKRs.
Very Few Girls Know How to Move
 Gracefully i'm the Water.

Very Few Girls Know How 60 Move
 Gracefully i'm the Water.
 The women who swim we'll, and their number increases every season, find 1t one of the most difficult things to learn in the whsle round of athletics, and ability in this line represents great deal of hard work and
 persistent endeavor. Nothing but the most tremendous earnestness of intention and long and persistent practice ever enables woman to throw a ball, for the reason of the length of her clavicle, which makes it extremely difficult for her to use her arm in the way required. And so in swimming; her head
 being heavier for her size and her lungs smaller than those of man, her constant
 tendency in the water with every stroke is to
 pitch forward on her head. The shape ot
 her body also increases this tendency, and
 the smaller size of her lungs gives her much
 less buoyanoy. All these she has to over-
 come before she can learn to be @ swimmer,
 and girl who is good one deserves great deal of credit. One of the professional fe- male swimmers said the other day:
 ''The majority of girls swim with their arms only, and if they do kick it is general ly out up into the air, which doesn't propel them along much. The truth of the matter is that it takes good deal of training to teach any woman to use her legs freely, for they have been hobbled together ever since she was ten years of age, and when she gets in the water she is shy about using them and drawing them up under her frog fashion, as a good male swimmer does. She bends her legs at the knee, so that the lower part of the limb rises gracefully above the water at every stroke and then drops it back with a thud, as If part of the roof of the bath house had fallen in, and when this sends her pitching up over her head she aggravates the trouble by kicking her heels out of the water and looking like duck diving for clams." And good many young women will reo- ognize with pain that this is very accurate description of themselves in the water. But it is also certain that with the proper sort of
 training she can get rid of all these awkward ways and learn to be as agile and graceful in
 the water as she is on the ballroom floor.
 There are half dozen big swimming schools in this city, but the best and most graceful
 swimmers are those who learn, not iu the
 smooth water of 8 tank, but in the tum bling hurries of the sea. For one thing, salt water
 is much more buoyant than fresh, which
 makes it easier to keep one's self afoat, and
 the swimmer who has learned in tank with
 out ripple upon it discovers that 1t is a
 very different thing to fight wave and tide.
 The same professional female swimmer who
 is so sarcastic about the efforts of her sister
 woman says:
 ''The way learned to swim was both an easy and sate one, and one I should recom-
 mend to women who are anxious to master the art. I began when was about fifteen years old, and my only teacher was my big
 brother, who had the two qualifications of the swimming teacher for being strong and amiable He began by teaching me not to be afraid Of deep water. The trouble Is that the moment one has the sense of there being no foothold beneath one, it takes away one's hp0ath hu0VaneV that is necessary to keep one afoat, for the lungs must be kept full of air as much as possible in swimming. This he did by mak- | ing me catch hold of his belt and swimming 1 into deep water with me, so that grew per fectly accustomed to the sensation of there