Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 71.djvu/166

160 gardens of the papal palace, the contestants receiving over two hundred gold and silver medals from the Pope, who had caused temporary thrones to be erected for himself and his court from which they witnessed the sports. Even in the island of Porto Rico athletic contests are superseding cock-fighting as a national amusement.

Not only, however, is there an unwonted activity in physical education, but the subject of personal and general hygiene never before received one half the attention that it does at this moment. The city of Philadelphia alone spends more resources and employs more agents in the interests of public health to-day than did the whole English speaking world a century ago. Not only has the movement to give every child, rich and poor alike, a good physical education become quite general, but steps are also taken to guard his health from contagion and from every injurious influence during his school life.

The first international congress on school hygiene was held in Nuremberg in 1904 and has been followed "by increased literary activity in nearly every country." The second is called to meet in London in August, 1907. King Edward will be the patron of the congress, and Sir Lauder Brunton its president. Steps are being taken to interest the entire civilized world in the effort "to promote by continued activity, in any way the cause of health and knowledge in education." Medical inspection of schools was introduced in Boston in 1890; in Philadelphia in 1892; in Chicago in 1896; and in New York in 1897. In Brussels special school physicians were first appointed in 1874. Now dentists and oculists have been appointed to the schools, and instruction in hygiene is given in eighty-five per cent, of them. Similar measures have been inaugurated in nearly every capital of Europe, and in the high school of Brookline, Massachusetts. The Russian Society for the Preservation of the Public Health has recently arranged a program for the investigation of the hygienic condition of the schools, and probably in every city of any size in America and many country places as well, medical inspection of schools is now a regular practise.

The great educational value of play, as such, has at last begun to be recognized. A German commission some few years ago visited the English public schools under instructions to study the influence of the games and sports carried on there upon the physical and intellectual development of the students. Their report was such that steps were immediately taken to introduce athletic sports and games into the German schools. An annual of four or five hundred pages entirely devoted to play is now published in that country, where, in fact, most of the pedagogic movements of the past century have originated, and after careful investigation, the play ground movement was systematically undertaken there; and there is now in some German cities a law requiring that each school shall provide a minimum play space for each