Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/647

Rh of the beloved director, Dr. Hitchcock. Some of the features have been adopted at Cornell, where, however, the work has to be combined with a system of military drill.

The conditions at Harvard are quite different. The number to be provided for runs up into the thousands. The system of electives abolishes class lines, and forbids an arrangement of the schedule which would leave certain hours free for exercise. It therefore becomes next to impossible to group the men for graded instruction, and prescribed work for the individual has been adopted as offering the best solution of the problem. Dr. Sargent's series of widely known and used pulley weights, adapted to a wide range of wants and strengths, was devised to render more efficient the making and carrying out of these prescriptions. While such a plan is admirably suited to the needs of Harvard, it has been a mistake to introduce it so extensively into schools where the age of the pupils renders more constant supervision and direction desirable, and where instruction can be given in graded classes, with the added incentive that comes from working in company with others. The use of the so-called developing appliances secures results which are corrective, and in a measure hygienic, but they lack recreative and educational qualities.

What has been said of Harvard will apply in the main to Yale, though there the interest in athletics overshadows all else. At Bowdoin a system of applied athletics, or competitive gymnastics, is the distinguishing feature. The freshmen, in addition to their prescribed corrective exercises, are given a preparatory discipline in military tactics and Indian-club swinging. The sophomores receive class instruction in the elements of boxing and wrestling, with supplementary squad work on the fixed apparatus (horizontal bar, parallel bars, flying rings, etc.), the squads being arranged in three groups graded according to strength and skill. The juniors learn to fence with single-stick and broadsword, and the seniors with foil and mask. The results sought are clearly educational, as well as corrective and hygienic. The work at Brown, though it differs in details, can be referred to the same type, except that military drill is required in the fall and spring of the freshman and sophomore years, under an officer in the United States army.

Where the work is required only during the early part of the course, or for a term or two, it is in too many instances unworthy to be called scientific or pedagogic. It is usually a combination of prescribed exercises for the individual and memorized class drills with light apparatus, together with optional use of the fixed apparatus. It has, to be sure, some corrective and hygienic value while it lasts, but is likely to grow monotonous, and is dropped before it has accomplished much in the way of genuine training. It can not