Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/540

522 skilled and unpracticed in any athletic exercise, even in that of walking. After she has been in college a few weeks she will tell yon, with great pride, that she has walked to town, a distance of two miles! Every claim upon her time at college, social as well as intellectual, outranks in importance the claims of exercise, and this duty yields to pressure from any other. If she were trained to rank study and play of the right kind as of equal importance to her mental development, the conscientiousness with which she devotes herself to study would secure her faithful attention to recreation.

It is encouraging to see that already some schools are setting the example of reform in this direction. One school at Indianapolis has introduced scientific physical training under a skilled director, and has placed this training on exactly the same footing as the intellectual exercises of the school. Besides gymnastics, daily outdoor exercise of two hours duration is required of each student.

In another school, in Connecticut, in the care of an English principal, there is no two-by-two daily promenade. Groups of not less than three girls are allowed, within certain bounds, to take a walk of from four to eight miles. In the hour and a half which they are required to spend in vigorous exercise out of doors, they play tennis, cricket, and basket-ball, occasionally having matches with other schools. In the winter physical training in the gymnasium is prescribed in connection with the winter sports of coasting and skating. A "high-stand" prize is offered, for which no girl is qualified to compete without a good athletic record for the year.

Of special importance to the student is the relation of athletics to the hygiene of the brain. Physicians say that if a muscle is once overtaxed or a nerve overstrained, they never regain their original tone and power; and yet I think that in America little care is taken to prevent such injury to the brain. We summarily dispose of its welfare with the classical platitude, "Mens sana m sano corpore."

What is indicated by the fact that the college "valedictorian" of the past so many times sank into obscurity after his commencement oration, while his classmate, not overzealous in study and reasonably interested in athletics, subsequently rose to distinction at the bar or in the pulpit?—by the fact that the graduate student frequently fails to fulfill undergraduate promise and to go from strength to strength in mental achievement?—by the fact that the country youth with meager opportunities, fresh from simple rural life, so frequently outstrips classmates who have known all the advantages which our best schools can afford? What is indicated by these conditions but that the students of our schools