In our own remarks, we have purposely confined ourselves to those physical exercises which partake most of the character of sports. Field-sports alone we have omitted, because these are so often discussed by abler hands. Mechanical and horticultural labors lie out of our present province. So do the walks and labors of the artist and the man of science. The out-door study of natural history alone is a vast field, even yet very little entered upon. In how many American towns or villages are to be found _local collections_ of natural objects, such as every large town in Europe affords, and without which the foundations of thorough knowledge cannot be laid? We can scarcely point to any. We have innumerable fragmentary and aimless "Museums,"--collections of South-Sea shells in inland villages, and of aboriginal remains in seaport towns,--mere curiosity-shops, which no man confers any real benefit by collecting; while the most ignorant person may be a true benefactor to science by forming a cabinet, however scanty, of the animal and vegetable productions of his own township. We have often heard Professor Agassiz lament this waste of energy, and we would urge upon all our readers to do their share to remedy the defect, while they invigorate their bodies by the exercise which the effort will give, and the joyous open-air life into which it will take them.
For, after all, the secret charm of all these sports and studies is simply this,--that they bring us into more familiar intercourse with Nature. They give us that _vitam sub divo_ in which the Roman exulted,--those out-door days, which, say the Arabs, are not to be reckoned in the length of life. Nay, to a true lover of the open air, night beneath its curtain is as beautiful as day. We personally have camped out under a variety of auspices,--before a fire of pine logs in the forests of Maine, beside a blaze of faya-boughs on the steep side of a foreign volcano, and beside no fire at all, (except a possible one of Sharp's rifles,) in that domestic volcano, Kansas; and every such remembrance is worth many nights of indoor slumber. We never found a week in the year, nor an hour of day or night, which had not, in the open air, its own special beauty. We will not say, with Reade's Australians, that the only use of a house is to sleep in the lee of it; but there is method in even that madness. As for rain, it is chiefly formidable indoors. Lord Bacon used to ride with uncovered head in a shower, and loved "to feel the spirit of the universe upon his brow"; and we once knew an enthusiastic hydropathic physician who loved to expose himself in thunder-storms at midnight, without a shred of earthly clothing between himself and the atmosphere. Some prudent persons may possibly regard this as being rather an extreme, while yet their own extreme of avoidance of every breath from heaven is really the more extravagantly unreasonable of the two.