58 
Sanitary Science in the United States: [January, 
obtaining suitable treatment. The statistics of the bodily 
condition of the students are regularly and frequently 
secured, and are supplying a collection of “ physiological 
constants,” which are of growing interest, and supply prac- 
tical helps in determining whether physical condition is 
within the bounds of health, and whether their development 
from time to time is normal or otherwise. 
All the classes are required to attend gymnasium exercises 
four times a week, and the regularity and faithfulness in 
this is made an element of collegiate standing. The per- 
formances are accompanied with music, and arranged to 
give full play to the animal spirits. This and the advan- 
tages personally experienced by the students have conspired 
to make the gymnastic fully as popular and well-attended 
as the literary exercises. Finally, the intelligent co-opera- 
tion of the student is secured by instruction upon the means 
of preserving health, physical and mental, with supple- 
mentary ledures upon human anatomy and physiology. 
Prof. Hitchcock,* writing of the chances of life of the young 
men under this hygienic discipline as compared with men at 
the same age elsewhere, says it is regarded as an established 
law that the chances of life grow less and less from about 
the fifteenth to the twenty-third year, and the rate of de- 
crease is very rapid. But the tables of health, as kept at 
Amherst College, show that there is an improvement in 
health from year to year through the course, the ages being 
from nineteen to twenty-three. For taking the number of 
sick men in the freshmen class as unity, the number in the 
sophomore year as 0*912, in the junior 0*759, and in the 
senior but 0*578, the percentage of sickness during the 
college course diminished to nearly one-half. 
In the light of this successful experiment, continued for 
a period of twenty years, it is not premature to urge upon 
colleges generally the formation of a similar department, 
and for my own part I see no method of raising the cha- 
racter of public school instruction so effectual as that of 
giving to the physical training of the children a very promi- 
nent place. 
VI. Health Resorts. 
The growing facilities each year for travel are steadily 
increasing the number of citizens who visit the country, the 
sea-shore, and the mountains. A salubrious village is lre- 
* Hygiene at Amherst College, Prof. Hitchcock: American Public Health 
Association. 
