all, they become infatuated with baseball and football, especially punting; they
do not take kindly to the soft large ball of the Hall House or the Civic League,
and prefer at first scrub games with individual self-exhibition to organized
teams. Lee sees the "arboreal instincts of our progenitors" in the very strong
propensity of boys from ten to fourteen to climb in any form; to use traveling
rings, generally occupied constantly to their fullest extent; to jump from steps
and catch a swinging trapeze; to go up a ladder and slide down poles; to use
horizontal and parallel bars. The city boy has plenty of daring at this age, but
does not know what he can do and needs more supervision than the country
youth. The young tough is commonly present, and though admired and copied
by younger boys, it is, perhaps, as often for his heroic as for his bad traits.
Dr. Sargent and others have well pointed out that athletics afford a wealth of
new and profitable topics for discussion and enthusiasm which helps against the
triviality and mental vacuity into which the intercourse of students is prone to
lapse. It prompts to discussion of diet and regimen. It gives a new standard of
honor. For a member of a team to break training would bring reprobation and
ostracism, for he is set apart to win fame for his class or college. It supplies a
splendid motive against all errors and vices that weaken or corrupt the body. It is
a wholesome vent for the reckless courage that would otherwise go to disorder
or riotous excess. It supplies new and advantageous topics for compositions and
for terse, vigorous, and idiomatic theme-writing, is a great aid to discipline,
teaches respect for deeds rather than words or promises, lays instructors under
the necessity of being more interesting, that their work be not jejune or dull by
contrast; again the business side of managing great contests has been an
admirable school for training young men to conduct great and difficult financial
operations, sometimes involving $100,000 or more, and has thus prepared some
for successful careers. It furnishes now the closest of all links between high
school and college, reduces the number of those physically unfit for college, and
should give education generally a more real and vigorous ideal. Its obvious
dangers are distraction from study and overestimation of the value of victory,
especially in the artificial glamours which the press and the popular furor give to
great games; unsportsmanlike secret tricks and methods, over-emphasis of
combative and too stalwart impulses, and a disposition to carry things by storm,
by rush-line tactics; friction with faculties, and censure or neglect of instructors
who take unpopular sides on hot questions; action toward license after games,
spasmodic excitement culminating in excessive strain for body and mind, with
alternations of reaction; "beefiness"; overdevelopment of the physical side of
life, and, in some cases, premature features of senility in later life, undergrowth