PHYSICAL TRAINING IN THE COLLEGES. 623 



the impressionable erne. The bones are being consolidated, the chest 

 is taking on its final shape, respiratory and circulatory power can still 

 be increased, the nervous system is wonderfully responsive to train- 

 ing, and the possibilities of attainment in muscular control are at 

 their highest. Never again can correct habits of carriage and action 

 be so easily established, and the human machine be brought so com- 

 pletely under the control of the will and made its ready servant. 



Student athletics, although they form an important part of the 

 necessary physical training, are not sufficient. So far as they go 

 they are invaluable, drawing the student out of doors and away 

 from the routine of school life, and affording exercise made vigorous 

 by the stimulus of competition. They help to counteract influences 

 that tend to overrefinement and effeminacy. They demand and 

 develop presence of mind, alertness, physical courage, self-control. 

 But even the size of the playgrounds which they require makes it 

 impossible that they should reach all the students in any but a 

 small institution. They attract the most proficient, not the most 

 needy. They have their place in the fall and spring, but must be 

 given up entirely, or only occasionally practiced, during the four or 

 five months of the year when the temptation to physical inactivity 

 is greatest. They leave untouched some of the commonest physical 

 defects. They are largely lacking in careful supervision, system, 

 gradation, adaptation to individual needs. They can be compared 

 to the student's general reading, rather than to his serious study. 

 In a word, though they yield the recreative and hygienic results of 

 physical training, they are lacking in the corrective ; they are educa- 

 tional, but only in a haphazard sort of way. 



Amherst College, in 1860, was the first in America to establish 

 upon a sound basis a department of physical training, placing at the 

 head of it a thoroughly educated physician, a member of the college 

 faculty, with the title of Professor of Hygiene and Physical Educa- 

 tion. Dr. Hooker, the first incumbent of the chair, was succeeded 

 a year later by Dr. Edward Hitchcock, whose period of service has 

 been an unbroken one from that day to this. Nearly a score of years 

 passed before Harvard College (1879) became second on the list, by 

 appointing Dr. D. A. Sargent assistant professor of physical training 

 and director of the Hemenway Gymnasium, which had been erected 

 at a cost of more than a hundred thousand dollars. Within more 

 recent years the same thoroughgoing provision has been made by 

 Bowdoin, Cornell, Oberlin, the Universities of Pennsylvania, Michi- 

 gan, and "Wisconsin, Leland Stanford University, and a number of 

 smaller institutions. Yale has two associate directors of the gym- 

 nasium who are physicians, but they are not given entire charge of 

 the department. At Brown and the University of Chicago the de- 



