Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/74

64 comeliness, and for instruction in methods of physical training. The gymnasium is large and well equipped, and was until recently under the charge of Dr. Mary V. Lee, a physician who was a specialist in physical training and made much use of the Delsarte system. Her recent, untimely death has left the department in charge of one of her pupils.

From the observatory, which crowns the central front of the building, the students see, as a whole, the views which all day long they catch from the windows below—views which have no small part in their student life. Northward stretches Ontario with boundless limit, its shores extending right and left in winding curves, bold bluffs, lowland, field, and forest. Below and around is the city: to the east, sloping down to the river and rising beyond it; to the west, soon shading off into farm lands; to the south, rising in a steep slope on which stands the City Orphan Asylum, a sister institution, tracing its origin to the same source. Whether the water and land sleep under a June sky or are vexed by January storms, the eye need ask for no finer scene.

As the mother of normal schools and methods, the Oswego school presents its most interesting aspect. Normal schools have been organized on the Oswego plan and called Oswego graduates to introduce her methods—as city schools in Portland, Boston, New Haven, New York, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Detroit, Washington, D. C., and other cities of less note; and as State schools in all the New England States, in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Mississippi, and California. This influence was felt first in New England and the Mississippi Valley and later in the South.

The graduates of the Oswego school number 1,703. Oswego graduates have taught in every State and Territory except Idaho and Nevada, in the District of Columbia, and in five foreign countries. Of the graduates who were born and reared in New York State over four hundred have been called away to teach in thirty-nine States, two Territories, the District of Columbia, Canada, Mexico, South America, Sandwich Islands, and Japan. New York State has complained that through Oswego she has educated teachers for the schools of other States; but could any but an unnatural mother fail to be proud to have her children worthy to be thus called away, and glad to have within her borders an institution whose graduates are sought for from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to the Argentine Republic, and the borders of Asia?