THE NEW GYMNASTICS FOR MEN, WOMEN, AND CHILDREN. By DIO LEWIS, M.D. With three hundred illustrations. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1862.
It is with sincerest pleasure that we commend this excellent book to the attention of every teacher and parent in America. We might add that we commend it as a gift book which would be most acceptable to youth, since it teaches them several hundred exercises, the greater portion of which require little or no apparatus, and none which cannot be very readily fitted up in almost any house. This book, moreover, includes a translation of Prof. KLOGS'S 'Dumb Bell Instructor' and Prof. SCHREBER'S 'Pangymnastikon.' By the way, is this the same work of SCHREBER'S which was translated some years ago by Prof. SEDGWICK, of New York, for his Gymnastic Journal? We remember the latter as a work of solid merit, recommending on sound anatomical principles the means of cure by gymnastics and calisthenics for many of the ills that flesh is heir to. We ask, not remembering accurately, and from observing that Prof, LEWIS confesses to having greatly abridged the volume in question, a plan never to be commended in any translation whatever. But for the whole work, with this exception, we have only praise. It is, we believe, the most practical, sensible book and the one most easy of application on this subject extant in any language. Let all interested remember that while it is indispensable to every gymnasium and every gymnast, its price _is_ only one dollar.
EYES AND EARS. By HENRY WARD BEECHER. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1862. New York: G. P. Putnam. 1862.
The crisp, careless dozen and a half of lines which Mr. BEECHER snaps at his readers by way of preface to this collection of papers, form the best review of its contents which will probably be written. They came principally, as he informs us, from the New York _Ledger_, and partially from the _Independent_; were consequently written very much for the many, and very little for the student of elaborate literature. They are unstudied, unpretentious--true _nugæ venales_, 'representing the impressions of happy homes, or the moods and musings of the movement * * fragmentary and careless as even a newspaper style will permit.' But, beyond this, we may assure the reader that these 'scintillant trifles' are knocked off from no second-rate material and by no awkward hand, but by one firm and confident in hasty and trivial efforts as in great ones, and producing the great even in the little. Many of these essay-lets have a peculiar charm: they seem to crave expansion--we wish them longer, and are as little pleased to find a fresh title whipping itself in before our eyes as children are at a rapidly managed magic-lantern show, when the impatient exhibitor presents a View in Egypt to eyes which have hardly begun to take in Solomon's Temple. We like them far better than the majority of the more elaborate, infinitely conceited, narrow-minded, squeakingly-witty essays with which the country has been of late visited for its sins from the Country Parson and his disciples.