(Webmaster's Notes:  The following book is published for entertainment only.  Although I am quite in agreement with many, but not all, of Mr. Camp's attitudes towards fitness and health, he wrote in the earliest part of the 20th century, and much has been learned since then.  While I applaud his attitude towards physcial fitness, exercise, and health, many of his "facts" have since been provem wrong, or at least not fully understood.  I may make the occasional commen along the way, genernally in parentheses and prefaced by WN, for Webmaster's Notes.

I hope you enjoy the book, but check up on the latest facts before following through on the exercise and fitness tips contained within.  By the way, the original book had quite a few illustrationg, and you may see reference here or there to them.  However, I have omitted them on this website.

Donovan Baldwin April 2009)

THE GOSPEL OF FRESH AIR

A generation ago the people who preached the good gospel of fresh air
were still viewed askance, although the new doctrine had begun to make
some impression. The early settlers in this country lived an outdoor
life perforce, and undoubtedly found all the excitement of a football
game in fighting the Indians; consequently, they attained proper
physical development. The descendants of these settlers still retained a
good deal of the outdoor habit, but in the third generation the actual
drift city-ward began. This meant the absence of incentives to outdoor
exercise, so far as life and the pursuit of happiness were concerned.
Hence, it became necessary to preach the gospel of fresh air.

"Oh, the joy with which the air is rife," sang Adams Lindsay Gordon, one
of the early preachers of this doctrine, and to-day thousands and tens
of thousands are appreciating the truth of the saying. Not alone the boy
at school or college with his football, baseball, and rowing, but the
middle-aged man with his golf and tennis, and the old man tramping
through the woods with the rod and gun, as he used to do thirty years
ago, and as he will do to the end--all these know what fresh air means.
Sunshine, through the medium of golf, has come to the life of thousands
of middle-aged wrecks formerly tied to an office chair. No one can
estimate the number of lives, growing aged by confinement in close
rooms, by lack of exercise, and by the want of cheerful interest in
something beside the amassing of dollars and cents, that have been saved
and rendered happy through the introduction of this grand sport whose
courses now dot the country from Maine to California, from the top of
Michigan to the end of Florida.

Twenty years ago in this country a man who came to his office in a golf
suit would have been regarded as demented, to say the least. To-day the
head of the house in many a large business refuses to permit anything to
interfere with his Saturday on the links. And this means that he and all
the officers in the departments under him, instead of viewing with
concern the interest of the men in outdoor sports--their devotion to
baseball and football, to tennis, golf, and track athletics--are glad
and willing that the great outdoors should have a real place in their
lives. It is good business policy.

Something must make up to the later generations for the loss of the
open air and outdoor work which the exigencies of the olden times
demanded of our ancestors, and that something has come in the shape of
physical exercise. But golf and long vacations are for the comparatively
rich. They are makeshifts rendered possible only by circumstances. 

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