Out-Door sports.
--The season for out-door sports begins this month, and in
Washington and
Baltimore the base-ball clubs have commenced play for the season.
This game of base-ball is a fine, healthy exercise, and a manly and exciting pastime.
Thousands of the mercantile and business community of the large cities north of us relieve the monotony of their daily pursuits by devoting a portion of their leisure time to the practice of either base-ball of cricket, and they not only derive considerable pleasure from the excitement of the game itself, but also great benefit from the exercise and physical development consequent upon the practice of these out-door sports.
We rank ourselves with those who are desirous of encouraging these invigorating games among our too-little-exercised citizens.
The fact is, we all, more or less, devote too much of our time and energies to our offices, desks and counters, and pay far too little attention to the recreation of body and mind, that nature absolutely requires to preserve health.
Especially do educated men make a terrible mistake in this respect; they make recreation purely mental; they give a little play to their minds after their day's pursuits, but none to their bodies, and therefore they grow weak and dyspeptic, and ultimately all the train of evils that follow a neglect of the proper recreation for the physical nature come, miserably to affect their spirits and distort their views of men and things around them.
Exercise, to be beneficial, should be attractive, and, to a certain extent, exciting, and we know of no other sports, as free from objectionable features, and at the same time as attractive and exciting, as these manly games of ball; and we think it would be an additton to our schools, that would lead to beneficial results, morally and physically, if each had a ball club attached to it. How many admirable practical lessons on discipline and good behavior — both very requisite among the majority of our boys — might be imparted by the teachers of our academies every Saturday afternoon, if they were to organize a ball club among their scholars and accompany the players to the field, and there guide and admonish them as occasion might require ! It would be recreation alike to teachers and scholars, and beneficial to both.
