INTRODUCTION TO EDWIM BREWSTER The present fashion of doing one's pleasure-swimming with a racing stroke has so far transformed the practice of the ancient art that the older books on the subject have become obsolete. On the other hand, the few books now on the market that are recent enough to treat adequately the new speed-strokes, have been written by men who are inter ested in racing, rather than in swimming for amusement. They treat of methods of training, of sprinting starts, of saving quarter-seconds on a turn. They are addressed to ambitious and muscular youth which has no fear of the water.
This little book is of a different sort. It makes its appeal to the middle-aged and the timid, to non-athletic persons and women, to swimmers who learned their swimming in the days of the breast stroke and want to try the newer meth ods ; and especially to • persons who, whether swimmers or not, have children to teach, and prefer to see them started in the way they should go. It aims to set forth the whole art of swimming, both new and old ; but to do this always from the standpoint of the new. It has nothing
to say of racing, and little of diving. There is nothing novel in its substance : that is the common knowledge of swim mers. It is, nevertheless, uncommon in three particulars, in that it (I) develops the subject as a series of detailed and orderly lessons, with special warnings against the mistakes commonly made at each point; (2) treats the breathing and the " slide " as integral parts of the stroke to be learned with the rest; and (3) recognizes that different persons will swim in different ways and must be taught differently, while the teaching of swimming to little children offers a spe cial problem, often of peculiar difficulty.
I have, in short, attempted to do for the ancient art of swimming what various other authors have been doing lately for various other useful arts, from English composition to the ornamentation of sheet brass and the game of golf.