The Dillon Tribune

SEDENTARY HABITS.

The alarming increase of late years in the proportion of sudden deaths is beginning to attract the attention of statisticians. It is largely due, no doubt, to more general mental activity without a proportionate increase in bodily exercise. The busy life of the age demands a constant hurry and excitement, and taxes the nervous powers to the utmost, to keep up in the race for money getting. One of the disadvantages of introducing facilities of transportation is the temptation to cut short time and distance by the habitual use of steam cars even in the daily transit from the dwelling to the office.

A sedentary occupation begets an almost unconquerable aversion to regular exercise, and the result of yielding to the indisposition is that the mental powers, kept at a steady tension for years, will some day suddenly relax and leave their abuser either lifeless or in helpless paralysis.

To literary and professional men vigorous and regular exercise is especially needful, and the examples of the effects in a hale old age will suggest themselves to every one. The exercise needed to keep the mind in tone and the physical force unabated, up to the four score years and ten, is not a daily spin behind a fast stepping horse, but the easy swinging gait which puts the walker over a country road at the rate of four or five miles an hour, and sends the blood pulsing with invigorating life to every portion of the system.

Two hours exercise a day, so far from being a waste of time, is a positive economy, supplying the nervous force for more and better work in ten hours than the want of street cars and carriages can get out of twelve.