Bathing

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BATHING.

Boys should early learn to swim, which can be done with much more ease and safety than is generally supposed. All that is necessary is to keep going in the water, in some safe place, day after day in the summer season, and in a little while one will find he is a swimmer.

Brooklyn and New York, surrounded as they are with all their water–advantages, ought to have an almost entire population of daily bathers. Those who could not swim ought to be the exceptions, whom the others would be sorry for, and not without a certain contempt for. Every morning and evening the East and North Rivers ought to show not hundreds but thousands and tens of thousands of persons, engaged in these manly, wholesome, and luxurious ablutions.

It might be objected that accidents would sometimes occur. Doubtless they would; they always will. But far more people take sick and die for the want of bathing, than will ever be drowned from going into the water. Boys should first learn in the swimming–baths. But a competent swimmer is safe almost any where in the waters hereabout, except certain well–known points, where the tide makes rushing eddies and small whirlpools.

Public baths ought to be established by the city, where the people could bathe free. Some ought to be of a safe depth for learners–others for experts. A few years ago, there was quite a talk about such baths; but it has died out. For all that, the day will come when Free Public Baths will be established, at the cost of the city, and put under proper regulations, and become frequented by the best persons–indeed by all persons.

To be a daily swimmer during the warm season–to acquire that ease, muscle, litheness of physical action, so fostered by the free movements of the limbs in the water–Who is not inspirited by the thought?

Yet it must be remembered that other things should be equal, in order to the full perfection and enjoyment of the swimming art. For instance, never practise swimming immediately after a hearty meal. Also, don’t go in too strong at first.

As one looks around Brooklyn, New York, and other American cities–as he sees such multitudes of undeveloped, dyspeptic, stunted, cadaverous, bad–countenanced, bad–actioned, hardly–ever–well persons–he can hardly help thinking how much a little more temperance in eating and drinking, with a little more common–sense, cold water, pure air, joined to one or two thoughts in time upon parentage and childhood, in their results–How much, we say, these would change, for the better, the faces and bodies of America.

And thus endeth our homily upon bathing.