SCIENCE. 



AN ILLUSTRATED JOURNAL PUBLISHED WEEKLY. 



Ve'rite sans fieur. 



NEW YOEK : THE SCIENCE COMPANF. 



FRroAY, JULY 2, 1886. 



COMMENT AND CRITICISM. 



The Bureau of education has made a valu- 

 able addition to our educational literature by its 

 recent publication of a paper by Dr. E. M. Hart- 

 well of the Johns Hopkins university, on physical 

 training in American colleges and universities. 

 ' Mens Sana in corpore sano,'' is perhaps as fa- 

 miliar as any classical quotation to collegiate 

 trustees and professors, but in the past they have 

 been inclined to trust too much to time and luck 

 to give it a practical application. The progress 

 we are now making in organized physical edu- 

 cation is the most significant fact brought out by 

 Dr. Hartwell's investigations. He shows that 

 vmtil 1859 no college in the country possessed a 

 commodious and well-furnished building devoted 

 to the purposes of physical training. In that 

 year, however, Amherst, Harvard, and Yale 

 built gymnasia. Amherst seems to have been 

 the most progressive in this matter ; and though 

 its first gymnasium has since been replaced by a 

 costly and much-improved building, yet from the 

 first, physical exercise has been required there of 

 all able-bodied students, and it has been directed 

 by an educated physician with a seat in the faculty. 



The Hemenway gymnasium at Harvard, and the 

 supervision of Dr. Sargent, have not only given a 

 great impetus to physical training there, but Dr. 

 Sargent's system of directive exercise has been 

 widely adopted. Since 1879, forty-eight institu- 

 tions have fitted up their gymnasia with Dr. 

 Sargent's apparatus ; and his directions are now 

 followed in very many of them, including 

 Amherst, Cornell, Haverford, Jolins Hopkins, 

 Lehigh, and Swarthmore. The same system 

 has just been introduced into Lafayette, and is 

 projected at Vassar and the University of Ver- 

 mont. The statistics and detailed information 

 that accompany the paper are of great value and 



No. 178. — 1886. 



interest, but its general tenor is more valuable 

 and interesting still. It shows that education — 

 physical, intellectual, and moral, as the phrase is 

 — has become something more than a meaningless 

 motto in many of our leading educational insti- 

 tutions. 



The trustees of the Ehzabeth Thompson 

 science fund have made the following grants 

 for research from the income of the fund : 1°, 

 H. M. Howe of Boston, Mass., seventy-five dollars, 

 for investigations on the fusibility of slags from 

 the smelting of lead emd copper, to be carried on 

 in the mining laboratories of the Massachusetts 

 institute of technology ; 2", two hundred dollars 

 to the New England meteorological society, for 

 the working-out of results from the very numer- 

 ous data which are now collected by the society 

 concerning the movements of local storms ; 3°, 

 one hundred and fifty dollars to Samuel Rideal, 

 Esq., of University college, London, for the con- 

 tinuation of Tyndall's experiments on the absorp- 

 tion of radiant heat by aromatic gases ; 4°, five 

 hundred dollars to Professor Rosenthal of Er- 

 langen, Germany, for researches on the produc- 

 tion and regulation of animal heat in health and 

 disease, with special reference to fevers. As the 

 number of applications was very large, the sums 

 asked for amounting to about thirty thousand 

 dollars, it became necessary for the trustees to 

 refuse several applications which entirely com- 

 mended themselves on account of the character of 

 the applicants and the nature of the proposed 

 work. The invidious task of selection was of 

 course difficult in the extreme, so that it is un- 

 advisable to give the grounds for the preferences 

 finally adopted. On the other hand, the very 

 number of applications increases the probability 

 of the fund being devoted to the support of thor- 

 oughly fruitful researches. It is a somewhat un- 

 expected turn of fortune's wheel which delivers 

 an American endowment, even in part for the 

 prosecution of research, at a German university ; 

 but it should not be overlooked that the fund was 

 established primarily to further the utility of the 

 proposed international scientific congress, and that 



