628 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



be too strongly insisted that proper grading of classes, careful selec- 

 tion and arrangement of teaching material, progression in each lesson 

 and throughout the series of lessons, and skillful adaptation of 

 methods to meet local conditions, are of fundamental importance in 

 physical training, as they are in other phases of educational effort. 



Some surprise may be excited by the statement that at the 

 present time the most painstaking and satisfactory work is being done 

 in the colleges for women, but it is probably true. The college 

 officers are as a rule more alive to the importance of the department, 

 the teachers are with few if any exceptions graduates of normal schools 

 of gymnastics which require two years of study, and the disturbing 

 element of athletics does not enter so largely into competition with 

 efforts at systematic physical training. At the Woman's College of 

 Baltimore the system employed is purely Swedish, and the instruction 

 is given by two graduates of the Royal Normal School of Gymnastics 

 in Stockholm. The same system is employed, though less inflexibly, 

 at Smith College. Bryn Mawr and Vassar have a combination of 

 individual work' and class instruction with light apparatus, making 

 most of the former. The work at Mount Holyoke is somewhat the 

 same, but more varied. At Wellesley athletics receive a relatively 

 larger share of attention. 



It will not be out of place to refer, in conclusion, to a source of 

 instruction and suggestion almost unknown to the great majority of 

 the directors of American college gymnasia. We in this country 

 have been greatly benefited by the study of Swedish gymnastics; but 

 any one who comprehends the wealth of the German literature of 

 gymnastics, and the extent and variety of the experience of which it 

 is the outcome, must regret the fact that it has been hitherto so 

 generally overlooked. It offers an inexhaustible storehouse of ma- 

 terial which will be found especially helpful in planning courses in 

 physical training for advanced classes in our institutions for higher 

 education. 



Matthew Arnold, though best known as a literary man, did equally 

 valuable work in education, with which he was closely connected for a 

 long series of years as inspector ; and Sir Joshua Fitch, in his biography 

 of him, credits him with having exerted a real and telling influence on 

 schools and done much indirectly to raise the aims and the tone of teach- 

 ers ; and, the biographer says. " if he saw little children looking good and 

 happy, and under the care of a sympathetic teacher, he would give a favor- 

 able report, without inquiring too closely into the percentage of scholars 

 who could pass the examination. He valued the elementary schools rather 

 as centers of civilization and refining influence than as places for enabling 

 the maximum of children to spell and write, and to do a given number of 

 sums without a mistake." 



