establishing time and distance standards with certificates and even prizes;
annexing toboggan slides, swings, etc., realizing that in both the preference of
youth and in healthful and moral effects, probably nothing outranks this form of
exercise. Such is its strange fascination that, according to one comprehensive
census, the passion to get to the water outranks all other causes of truancy, and
plays an important part in the motivation of runaways. In the immense public
establishment near San Francisco, provided by private munificence, there are
accommodations for all kinds of bathing in hot and cold and in various degrees
of fresh and salt water, in closed spaces and in the open sea, for small children
and adults, with many appliances and instructors, all in one great covered arena
with seats in an amphitheater for two thousand spectators, and many adjuncts
and accessories. So elsewhere the presence of visitors is now often invited and
provided for. Sometimes wash-houses and public laundries are annexed. Open
hours and longer evenings and seasons are being prolonged.
Prominent among the favorite games of early puberty and the years just before
are those that involve passive motion and falling, like swinging in its many
forms, including the May-pole and single rope varieties. Mr. Lee reports that
children wait late in the evening and in cold weather for a turn at a park swing.
Psychologically allied to these are wheeling and skating. Places for the latter are
now often provided by the fire department, which in many cities floods hundreds
of empty lots. Ponds are cleared of snow and horse-plowed, perhaps by the park
commission, which often provides lights and perhaps ices the walks and streets
for coasting, erects shelters, and devises space economy for as many diamonds,
bleachers, etc., as possible. Games of hitting, striking, and throwing balls and
other objects, hockey, tennis, all the courts of which are usually crowded, golf
and croquet, and sometimes fives, cricket, bowling, quoits, curling, etc., have
great "thumogenic" or emotional power.
Leg exercise has perhaps a higher value than that of any other part. Man is by
definition an upright being, but only after a long apprenticeship.[16] Thus the
hand was freed from the necessity of locomotion and made the servant of the
mind. Locomotion overcomes the tendency to sedentary habits in modern
schools and life, and helps the mind to helpful action, so that a peripatetic
philosophy is more normal than that of the easy chair and the study lamp. Hill-
climbing is unexcelled as a stimulus at once of heart, lungs, and blood. If
Hippocrates is right, inspiration is possible only on a mountain-top. Walking,
running, dancing, skating, coasting are also alterative and regulative of sex, and
there is a deep and close though not yet fully explained reciprocity between the