Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/538

520 regard the gymnastics of a foreign school without a slight feeling of wonder and compassion, so much more animating and interesting do the games of his remembrance seem to him."

Statistics regarding the benefits that students have derived from athletic games are frequently asked for. These are difficult to state in the form of records. Nevertheless, the advantages are very real and very evident. A graduate of the University of California writes me, "Athletics proper, as distinguished from physical culture, are enormously important for girls—more so than for boys, for it brings out a side of their nature cramped from childhood." She says that, from her own experience, she knows that "there is nothing like the hard-played game to bring out powers of the body that the routine work can not touch. Still more, the mental and moral effect is wonderful. There is a zest, a freedom, a whole-souled sincerity of effort, a flinging aside of every consideration of how she is looking, or whether she is doing the proper thing, that goes right to the root of some of the most inveterate evils of feminine adolescence. The effect on our basket-ball girls has been perceptible in a single year; all their attitudes toward life have taken on a healthier and heartier tone." She adds that this is heartily the belief of the director of the gymnasium of the University of California.

The tendency of athletic games to dispel morbid conditions is, I think, too well known to require comment. One can not watch a game of basket-ball without observing the will-power, nerve-control, and general self-government which the rules of the game to prevent all rough play, and the necessity of quick decision and instant decided action, cultivate.

The match games give outdoor entertainment to the whole body of students, thoroughly diverting, and of the most healthful kind, free from all the unwholesome influences which more or less attend dramatics.

As a less direct result of the growing interest in athletics we may notice the increased stature of women, and a corrected aesthetic judgment which now pronounces the normal form the most beautiful.

A dinner was recently given at Vassar by one of the students, at which the guest qualification was the habitual wearing of broad-soled shoes. The hostess is a disciple of Matthew Arnold, who can not enjoy "sweetness and light" without a disposition to "make them prevail."

Many students ride the bicycle in all the colleges. So many papers have appeared in current literature setting forth the advantages of bicycling that little remains to be said on the subject. A note appeared in a September journal to the effect that at the annual sanitary conference at Newcastle, England, Dr. Turner