anomalous survival to-day. Mechanico-therapeutics, the purpose and service of
each chief kind of apparatus and exercise, the value of work on stall bars with
chest weights, of chinning, use of the quarter-staff, somersaults, rings, clubs,
dumb-bells, work with straight and flexed knees on machinery, etc., will be
taught. Fourth, the history of gymnastics from the time of its highest
development in Greece to the present is full of interest and has a very high and
not yet developed culture value for youth. This department, both in its practical
and theoretical side, should have its full share of prizes and scholarships to
stimulate the seventy to seventy-five per cent of students who are now
unaffected by the influence of athletics. By these methods the motivation of
gymnastics, which now in large measure goes to waste in enthusiasm, could be
utilised to aid the greatly needed intellectualization of those exercises which in
their nature are more akin to work than play. Indeed, Gutsmuths's first definition
of athletics was "work under the garb of youthful pleasure." So to develop these
courses that they could chiefly, if not entirely, satisfy the requirements for the
A.B. degree, would coordinate the work of the now isolated curriculum of the
training-schools with that of the college and thus broaden the sphere of the latter;
but besides its culture value, which I hold very high, such a step would prepare
for the new, important, and, as we have seen, very inadequately manned
profession of physical trainers. This has, moreover, great but yet latent and even
unsuspected capacities for the morals of our academic youth. Grote states that
among the ancient Greeks one-half of all education as devoted to the body, and
Galton urges that they as much excelled us as we do the African negro. They
held that if physical perfection was cultivated, moral and mental excellence
would follow; and that, without this, national culture rests on an insecure basis.
In our day there are many new reasons to believe that the best nations of the
future will be those which give most intelligent care to the body.
[Footnote 1: See H.G. Beyer. The Influence of Exercise on Growth. American
Physical Education Review, September-December, 1896, vol. I, pp. 76-87.]
[Footnote 2: J.H. McCurdy, Physical Training as a Profession.
Association Seminar, March, 1902, vol. 10, pp. 11-24.]
[Footnote 3: These records are taken from the World Almanac, 1906, and
Olympic Games of 1906 at Athens. Edited by J.E. Sullivan, Commissioner
from the United States to the Olympic Games. Spalding's Athletic
Library, New York, July, 1906.]