Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/537

Rh contests are held. An athletic association has been organized by the students, and an annual field day has been observed, when there have been contests in field and track athletics.

If there be those who assume that physical excellence is the attribute of the so-called "new woman," and therefore unwomanly, we can only reply that the idea that women should have the same physical training as men is no newer than Plato's Republic, wherein the Greek sage insists that the women should have the same physical training as the men, that the race might be continued in the highest perfection of mental and physical vigor. Little is told us of the education of girls in Greece; but this we know—that Spartan girls were subjected to a course of training differing from their brothers only in being less severe. They had their own exercise grounds, in which they learned to leap, run, cast the javelin, throw the discus, play ball, wrestle, dance, and sing. The result of this fine physical training was not only health and strength, but beauty; for it is a well-attested fact that the daughters of Sparta were handsomer and more attractive than the more delicately nurtured Athenians. In Aristophanes, Lampito, a Spartan woman, excites the jealous admiration of the Athenian women because of her beauty. When some one said to Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas, "You Spartans are the only women who rule men," she proudly replied, "Because we are the only women who bring forth men."

In behalf of the introduction of games as supplementary to the work of the gymnasium, I will quote Miss Hill, of the Wellesley Gymnasium: "Four years ago I began to give my services to the college in organized ‘sports and pastimes’ in connection with the department, feeling that we were giving in America too much attention to artificial exercises and too little to the development of the play instinct, which is the natural means of recreation. I believe in gymnastics for girls for their corrective value and as an antidote to the faulty postures we take so much, the effects of wrong clothing, etc., lack of knowledge how to breathe, run, walk, to climb and leap for practical purposes and self-preservation in accident. But I think we use them too much. We waste time and strength in not accomplishing the direct results of gymnastics, and fail to obtain the nerve stimulus that comes from natural play. If games and sports are organized and directed to a certain extent by the director of physical training, often, of course, the gymnastic and corrective value can be got out of a sport, and the fun, too."

Matthew Arnold, in his work on Higher Schools and Universities in Germany, says, in describing the exercise ground of a German school finely equipped for gymnastics, "Nothing, however, will make an ex-schoolboy of one of the great English schools