HOW TO GET STRONG
ARISTOTLE (384–322 B.C.)
"Philip of Macedon thanked the gods, at the birth of Alexander; not so much for their having blessed him with a son as for the son's being born at a time when Aristotle was living to superintend his education."—McCormick's Burke (1798), p. 6.
Born at Stagira 384 B.C.; of a famous medical family; a great dissector of animals—as well as of arguments; pupil of Plato; at fifty opening his famous lyceum near the temple of Apollo Lyceius, walking up and down the garden as he lectured; and so called Peripatetic; tutor of Alexander the Great; after the latter's death, a hostile, party coming into power, he fled to Chalcis, in Eubœa, and died at sixty-two. Ruling the world of thought for 1500 years down to the time of Bacon; one writer says that his intellectual power "was owing in a large degree to the harmonious education in which the body shared as well as the mind. That no dyspepsia broke the harmony of his thoughts, and no neuralgia twinged his system with agony." And, by-the-way, does it not seem as if the most learned and intelligent ought to know how to take at least fair care of their own bodies?
And then ought to do it? Yet how many do?
Many of our towns to-day have their Lyceums; but here was the great parent one of them all, with this great man at its head; and ever since, in all lands, his work and words have been taught in the same schools.
And why have we dropped the Peripatetic feature?
And with such a master, did he, could he, omit to train his body?
Small and slender in person, and part of the time of feeble health, Aristotle accomplished in his day the task of a giant.
Then he was weak, after all?
Look at his statue, the well-known sitting one (of which there is a copy in the Metropolitan Museum in New York City). Deep, close thought in each line of that fine face. But see those legs,—a rare pair. Go to
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