In his first report Superintendent Hickock gives his readers such an outlook over the past twenty years of school life in Pennsylvania as a mountain climber, after a laborious tramp through a varied country, may attain while resting on the first eminence of the vast and mysterious range that soars and retreats peak above peak toward a distant horizon. "The school system for many years had lost the prestige and hopes of its earlier years, and has failed as yet to fulfill the expectations of its friends." He attributes this unsatisfactory condition to organic defects in the structure of the system, and consequent blundering and maladministration, a pervading apathy of prejudice of the public mind, represented by legislative unwillingness to make needed changes in the school laws, the lack of any suitable agency for the examination and inspection of teachers and the proper supervision or grading of schools, no adequate power to lay taxes or build schoolhouses and other indispensable needs, no school architecture, no legal place for the transaction of business in the districts, no connecting links between the extremes of the system, and no efficient control anywhere. All these negative evils were greatly exasperated by a habit of dividing the territory of the State into small and isolated districts. The school law of 1854 was the result of twenty years of steady agitation against the defects that would have wrought the complete destruction of the common school, and being this, the deliberate conclusions of this period had "come to stay."

The act for the establishment of normal schools passed subsequent to the legislation of 1854 had also the clause for the establishment of a separate school department in 1857. The plan for the normal schools at first omitted all provision for a State subsidy, but after repeated amendment, as suggested by experience, steadily gained upon the public confidence. It had the merit of probably supplying to Pennsylvania a larger number of teachers who had enjoyed the opportunity of even a short term in a school known as professional than any other State. This, with the later development of the institute system, has made this feature one of especial pride to many of the educators of the State. Of one thing the schoolmen are justly proud-that from the first the system was one of free schools, it having at no time been burdened with the rate bill of New York or the tuition fee of some of the New England States.

The close of the active and successful administration of Superintendent Hickock in 1860 brought the schools and the State to the verge of the civil war. It was then that the Commonwealth turned again to Dr. Burrowes and ordered, as one of the closing acts of his long and faithful educational career, that he should resume the superintendency held by himself twenty-five years before.

CHAPTER XII.

ON PHYSICAL TRAINING.

By EDWARD MUSSEY HARTWELL, Ph. D., M. D., late director of physical training in the public schools of Boston and sometime associate in physical training in the Johns Hopkins University.

Physical training may be defined in general terms as the development by use and wont of the motor powers of the human body, either for the sake of health or discipline, or for the sake of both.

Abraham Lincoln once characterized the slavery question as "a durable question.”` In the history of education the question as to the legitimate place and standing of physical training has assuredly proved itself a durable question, since, in a certain sense, the history of education may be regarded as the history of a series of attempts on the part of thinkers and teachers to reconcile the claims of bodily and mental training in the upbringing of children and youth. In times past and in our own time physical training has been exalted, tolerated, neglected, or contemned according to the character of the conceptions concerning the nature of the human body and of its relations to the human mind which have exerted a dominant influence upon those charged with the shaping of educational policy and the administration of educational affairs.

TYPICAL IDEALS OF MANLINESS.

There appear to be four principal ideals of manly excellence which, singly or in combination, have dominated the minds of the promoters or governors of educational foundations. Those ideals may be broadly characterized as the Greek or aesthetic, the monkish or ascetic, the military or knightly, and the medical or scientific. The first three have been influential in varying degrees from very early times. The fourth, although compounded to some extent of ancient elements, is so strongly tinged with utilitarian and psycho-physical ideas that it is best described as modern. All of these ideals are traceable to conceptions of human nature and destiny which may be roughly classed under the two heads of lugubrious and cheerful.

The Greek ideal was not lugubrions. "Everything that is good," says Plato in the Timaeus, "is fair, and the fair is not without measure, and the animal who is fair may be supposed to have measure. Now, we perceive lesser symmetries and comprehend them, but about the highest and greatest we have no understanding, for there is no symmetry greater than that of the soul to the body. This, however, we do not perceive, nor do we allow ourselves to reflect that when a weaker or lesser frame is the vehicle of a great and mighty soul, or, conversely, when a little soul is incased in a large body, then the whole animal is not fair, for it is defective in the most important of all symmetries; but the fair mind in the fair body will be the fairest and loveliest of all sights to Him who has the seeing eye."

In an article on "The genius of Plato," by the late Walter Pater, it is well said that "not to be 'pure from the body,' but to identify it, in its utmost fairness, with the fair soul by a gymnastic 'fused in music' became from first to last the aim of education as he [Plato] conceived it. Platonism has contributed largely, has been an immense encouragement, toward the redemption of matter, of the world of sense, by art, by all right education, by the creeds and worships of the Christian church, toward the vindication of the human body."

The antithesis between the Greek and the ascetic ideals is clearly indicated in a remark of Apuleius concerning Egyptian and Greek modes of worship. "The Egyptian deities," he says, were chiefly honored by lamentations, and the Greek divinities by dances."

The ideal of the monk, which, after the first few centuries of the Christian church, exercised such a profound influence upon European thought and life, was of Asiatic and, to a considerable extent, of Egyptian origin. "The duty of a monk," said St. Jerome, "is not to teach, but to weep." Weeping and self-torture might well absorb the energies of men who conceived that all flesh was the creation of satan and championed the belief that soul and body are independent and mutually antagonistic entities.

When it was held that "the greatest of all evils was pleasure, because by it the son is nailed or riveted to the body," and that mental and spiritual health was best subserved by bodily weakness, we can not wonder that "a hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac," to borrow the words of Lecky, "without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, became the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates and Cato."

The military ideal of manliness, now existing side by side with the monkish ideal, now confronting and challenging it, has played a most important and conspicuous part in the education of the sons of noblemen and of gentlefolk. Herodotus tells us that the sons of the Persians, from their fifth year to their twentieth, were carefully taught three things only-to ride, to draw the bow, and to speak the truth. Physical training was predominant in the education of free-born youth among the Spartans, Romans, and ancient Germans. It consisted chiefly of martial exercises and the chase, and its aim was the formation of an agile and enduring soldiery. "Plaienge att weapons" formed a necessary part of every gentleman's education in Britain as well as on the Continent, even later than the sixteenth century. "I swear I'd rather that my son should hang than learn letters. For it becomes the sons of gentlemen to blow a horn nicely, to hunt skillfully, and elegantly carry and train a hawk. But the study of letters should be left to the sons of rustics." These are the words of an English gentleman of the time of Henry VIII, who, on hearing letters praised, "was roused to sudden anger and burst out furiously."

The ideal of the Greeks sprang from a passion for beauty and harmony and a joyous sense of well-being; that of the theologian and the monk was conditioned too often on and determined by a profound ignorance of, and a bitter contempt for, the body, while that of the soldier and the knight owed its peculiar features to a rude appreciation of bodily force and skill gained from experience in camp and field.

It is not to the generative vigor of any or all of these ideals that we owe our modern doctrine of the interdependence of body and mind, which doctrine is but vaguely, if at all, apprehended by the majority of those who quote with generous unction the time-worn mens sana in corpore sano line of Juvenal, who exhorts men not only to "pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body," but also to "ask for a brave soul unscared by death." No; the belief that to work the mind is also to work a number of the bodily organs, that not a feeling can arise, not a thought pass, without a set of concurring bodily processes," is the child of the scientific spirit embodied in the new physiology and the new psychology,

SCIENCE AND EXPERIENCE WARRANT RECOGNITION OF PHYSICAL TRAINING.

My main contention is that both the teachings of modern science and the lessons of experience warrant the demand that physical training should be recognized and provided for as an integral and necessary branch of instruction in the elementary and secondary education of both sexes.

Medicine and the biological sciences, e. g., physiology, psychology, zoology, and embryology, which are the offspring of medicine, are the sciences which throw most light upon the structure and powers of the human body.

Before noting the characteristics of the principal national systems of physical training, or attempting to trace their history or to estimate their value, it will be well to consider the nature of physical training and its relation to education in the light of the modern doctrine of the human body.

SCIENTIFIC BASIS OF MODERN DOCTRINE OF HUMAN BODY.

The doctrine of the human body current among scientific men is one of the most notable and significant achievements of the modern spirit. It has been wrought out and developed during the past two centuries and a half, and owes its characteristics of comprehensiveness, suggestiveness, and illuminative power to the improvement and consolidation of the physical sciences, particularly of that group which we term the biological sciences. Mr. Huxley has called attention to the essential solidarity and kinship of these sciences, and to the genetic relation between them and medicine, which till within very recent times included "what little physical science could be seen to bear directly upon human life.”

“It is a peculiarity of the physical sciences," he says in his address on "The connection of the biological sciences and medicine," "that they are independent in proportion as they are imperfect; and it is only as they advance that the bonds which really unite them all become apparent."

Through the advance alluded to by Mr. Huxley man's knowledge of himself has been immensely increased and his conception of nature and his place in nature radically changed. The human mind has been thereby both uplifted and enlarged. Considered simply as a member of the animal kingdom man is a much more intelligible and interesting creature than ever before, since so many new and commanding points of view have been established from which his structure and powers and the laws governing the development and use of his powers may be studied profitably. In the modern doctrine of the individual human body are mirrored the results of man's observations and reflections touching: (1) Nature, including the characteristics of its animate and inanimate divisions and their relations to each other; (2) the structural and functional characteristics of the living beings which inhabit our globe and their relations to the living beings which have become extinct; and (3) the evolution of living beings, past and present, the term evolution being employed "as a general name for the history of the steps by which any living being has acquired the morphological and physiological characters which distinguish it."

All nature is in a state of flux owing to the ceaseless dance of atoms and molecules, whereby matter is metamorphosed and energy transformed. In the little corner of the universe which we call the solar system the sun is the driving power as well as the source of energy. Our planet, with its continents and oceans, its realm of living organisms, and its all-encompassing atmosphere, floats and rolls in a determined path in the great ocean of energy furnished and ruled by the sun. It is never the same world for long. Its ocean is continually shifting its bed and boundaries and constantly agitated over all its surface and throughout its deeps. Its continents are continually wrought and sculptured into new shapes and contours by its streams of air and water. But the most changeful and varied realm beneath the sun is the realm of living things, which embraces the aggregate sum, in all its countless forms, of organized material, which is at once the culminating and most transitory and unstable stage in the metamorphosis of matter.

RELATION OF ANIMATE TO INANIMATE NATURE.

If we confine our attention to a single organism, e. g., protococcus, amoba, or the human body, we discover that by reason of its possession of protoplasm it is related in a peculiar way to the world's stock of inorganic, energy yielding substances contained in its soil, air, and water, and to the streams of energy which encompass the earth and its atmosphere as a part of the solar system. The world's stock of material and the world's stores of energy are continually modified in character through the agency of the world's fund of living substance, which is apportioned among the individuals that make up the two great kingdoms of animated nature. Every living organism, whether simple or complex, continually draws, directly or indirectly, from the ocean of energy derived from the sun, and contributes to the ceaseless round of transformations whereby potential energy is converted into active energy, and vice versa; and at the same time, and pari passu, every such organism is drawing energy-yielding materials from the earth's stock of air, soil, and water, metamorphosing these materials into living substance and returning material drained of its energy to the world's stream of temporary waste substances. Taken together and viewed as a whole, the sum total of plants and animals constitutes a vast system of intermediate stations of exchange in the world's circulation of interchangeable material and circulation of interconvertible energy. Every aggregation of primitive or derived protoplasm is such a station, but for a time only, since every individual organism is strictly limited in respect both of the duration and field of its activity. But so many individual organisms fulfill their life purpose by the transmission of life to new individuals that the species and the sum of the species persist, and new series of stations for the metamorphosis of material and the transformation of energy continually arise in place of abandoned stations and worn-out organisms. As the surface of a full flowing stream presents a constant and shifting succession of eddies and transient currents of varying degrees of complexity, so the restless, ever-flowing oceanic stream of animate nature bears on its surface a constant, though ever varying succession of living organisms, which may be likened to bubbles, eddies, and currents that play upon every sea-bound stream of water.

Its

The ocean, though divisible into drops of water, is one, however much teachers of geography may subdivide it in thought and multiply names for its parts. It is fed by mighty river systems made up of innumerable tributaries ranging in volume from mere trickles of moisture down the face of a mountain cliff to the resistless floods which sweep through a river plain into the sea. It is the seat of complicated systems of tides and currents dependent upon the agency of atmospheric and lunar forces swayed by the energy of the sun. It is continually losing water to the air through the lifting power of the sun's rays. It is continually receiving condensed watery vapor, either directly as rain and snow, or indirectly as river water laden with earthy matter in suspension and earthy salts in solution. rivers and their rivulets have eroded and sculptured the earth's surface from the mountains to the sea, and continue to do so. The earth and air contribute of their substance and the sun of its energy to enable the ocean to play its part as a recoptacle and reservoir of material and a source of energy for the support of the myriad forms of life that inhabit our globe. No wonder the earth has been considered by some to be a vast organism on which plants and animals lead a parasitic life. No wonder the magnitude of this goodly frame the earth, the interplay of the forces having their seat and theater in and around it, and man's relations to inorganic nature on the one hand and to organic nature on the other should challenge and stimulate the speculations of philosophers and stir and quicken the imagination of poets.

THE HUMAN BODY AS A MACHINE.

In general terms the modern doctrine of the human body is based upon two leading ideas, viz: First, that that organism is an aggregation of matter which, by reason of the arrangement of its parts and the qualities of the living substance compos