In Panhellenic games as well as at present, athleticism in its manifold forms was
one of the most characteristic expressions of adolescent nature and needs. Not a
single time or distance record of antiquity has been preserved, although
Grasberger[4] and other writers would have us believe that in those that are
comparable, ancient youthful champions greatly excelled ours, especially in
leaping and running. While we are far from cultivating mere strength, our
training is very one-sided from the Greek norm of unity or of the ideals that
develop the body only for the salve of the soul. While gymnastics in our sense,
with apparatus, exercises, and measurements independently of games was
unknown, the ideal and motive were as different from ours as was its method.
Nothing, so far as is known, was done for correcting the ravages of work, or for
overcoming hereditary defects; and until athletics degenerated there were Do
exercises for the sole purpose of developing muscle.
On the whole, while modern gymnastics has done more for the trunk, shoulders,
and arms than for the legs, it is now too selfish and ego-centric, deficient on the
side of psychic impulsion, and but little subordinated to ethical or intellectual
development. Yet it does a great physical service to all who cultivate it, and is a
safeguard of virtue and temperance. Its need is radical revision and coordination
of various cults and theories in the light of the latest psycho-physiological
science.
Gymnastics allies itself to biometric work. The present academic zeal for
physical development is in great need of closer affiliation with anthropometry.
This important and growing department will be represented in the ideal
gymnasium of the future—First, by courses, if not by a chair, devoted to the
apparatus of measurements of human proportions and symmetry, with a
kinesological cabinet where young men are instructed in the elements of
auscultation, the use of calipers, the sphygmograph, spirometer, plethysmograph,
kinesometer to plot graphic curves, compute average errors, and tables of
percentile grades and in statistical methods, etc. Second, anatomy, especially of
muscles, bones, heart, and skin, will be taught, and also their physiology, with
stress upon myology, the effects of exercise on the flow of blood and lymph, not
excluding the development of the upright position, and all that it involves and
implies. Third, hygiene will be prominent and comprehensive enough to cover
all that pertains to body-keeping, regimen, sleep, connecting with school and
domestic and public hygiene—all on the basis of modern as distinct from the
archaic physiology of Ling, who, it is sufficient to remember, died in 1839,
before this science was recreated, and the persistence of whose concepts are an