earners, while as yet the privileged youth selected by their parents or by circumstances to engage in pursuits which demand special aptitudes or technical training are too undeveloped, in most instances, to make rational choice of a vocation, and much less to engage in professional pursuits or the higher crafts.

On the whole, since the period of most active growth appears to be followed by one of comparative exhaustion, when the organism is peculiarly susceptible to disturbing and deterrent influences, the second may be considered, from the hygienic standpoint, as the most critical of our three periods. Exhausting constitutional disease, excessive mental or bodily exertion, underfeeding, ill-judged deprivation of muscular exercise, may readily lead to irremediable stunting or enfeeblement, especially in those who are city born and city bred. If physical education be neglected or misdirected during this period, if it be deferred to a more convenient season, it can not accomplish its perfect work, either as regards the promotion of health or the development of the motor powers of the brain.

The main general departments of physical education should be systematically availed of, i. e., both gymnastic training and athletic pastimes should be given a prominent place in the school curriculum, and the forms of exercise selected should be more varied, complicated, and difficult than those employed in the previous period. But the time for engaging in feats or contests that demand extraordinary strength, endurance, or skill is not yet.

Third period, from the beginning of the seventeenth to the close of the twenty-fourth ycar. This, the period of established adolescence, is distinctively a period of development of development of character as well as of bodily and mental faculty. The life of the race begins to be reflected in the life of the individual, to whom a higher and wider range of activities is opened through the development and perfecting of his higher fundamental and accessory neuro-muscular mechanisms. Emotion is coordinated with self-chosen aims and ideals; self-directed actions increase in number and effectiveness, and the individual is prepared by special forms of technical training to enter upon his life work as an adult, independent member of society.

The muscles, which are to serve as the executive instrument of the brain, do not attain full growth till toward the end of the second period. Then, when both brain and muscles are fully grown, neuro-muscular development enters upon its most active and important stage, i. e., in the third period. Measures that directly promote growth are mainly hygienic measures, and measures that directly promote development are mainly educative. An intelligent combination of hygienic and educative measures is called for, both in the sensory and motor education of the individual, during each and all of the three periods; but as regards physical education during the whole of the first and the first half of the second period, hygienic forms of exercise should preponderate, while during the last half of the second and the whole of the third period educative forms of exercise should be assigned the leading part-provided that practically normal growth and sound health have been secured to start with.

Attempts at tours de force, trophy winning, and record breaking, which would be ill-judged at an earlier stage, may now be profitably encouraged-within reasonable limits in the case of well-developed and well-trained gymnasts and athletes. Doubtless there are valid objections to be urged against rampant athleticism. Nevertheless, the predilection of collegiate youth for athletic sports and contests may be justified as natural and fitting by the teachings of neurology and psychology, if once it be admitted that the development of mind and character, as well as that of the brain and muscles, is subject to the laws of evolution. The average collegian, if a healthy animal, is apter at expressing himself fully in terms of muscularity than in terms of mentality. Intellectual maturity comes later, unless arrested development supervenes. It can hardly be considered a misfortune that, in the heyday of youth, the sons of civilized men tend to exhibit in their games something of the hardihood, daring, and contentiousness which characterized the principal pursuits of their primitive, beast-hunting, war-making ancestors.

PHYSICAL TRAINING VERSUS PHYSICAL CULTURE.

Elementary education is naturally assigned to the first and second periods. Secondary education usually begins in the second, and either terminates in the third or merges into superior or technical education. According to the statistical tables contained in Superintendent Seaver's last report, the elementary public schools of Bostor on January 31, 1897, included upward of 93 per cent of all the pupils in the day schools, while less than 7 per cent were found in the secondary schools. Classifying the 71,949 pupils in question in accordance with the age scale used above, it appears that 27.9 per cent of them are in the first, 66.2 per cent in the second, and only 5.7 per cent in the third period of immaturity. It is plainly obvious, then, that the main work of our schools is elementary and general, and that training and not culture should be their end and aim. Culture presupposes and is based upon fully developed and disciplined powers, which are precisely the powers that the pupils in elementary and secondary schools lack. It is, therefore, a misleading use of language to apply the term "physical culture" to school gynastics and school sports. Physical training is what our school children need, but have never had in the measure adequate to their needs. It may be that the day will come when our colleges and universities will undertake the "physical culture" of their students; but their efforts will be barren and fruitless unless they shall first induce the secondary schools to do what comparatively few of them even pretend to undertake at present, viz, provide intelligently and adequately for the physical training of the youth they profess to educate.

It seems to me that, as it is generally employed, the term "physical culture" is a misnomer, and that it had better be eschewed when one undertakes to discuss the forms of muscular exercise that are best adapted to meet the needs of pupils in elementary and secondary schools, since it is not properly synonymous with the terms "physical training" and "physical education," which are interchangeable according to the best usage. Moreover, as usage varies not a little with regard to the two terms last mentioned, it may be well to consider their significance before proceeding further. The term "physical education" has been frequently employed to signify all such measures as are classed by the best writers, along with exercise, under the head of personal hygiene, c. g., dress, diet, bathing, etc. When employed in this sense, the term manifestly means too much, whereas when physical training is made to include only such particular forms of exercise as respiratory gymnastics, clocutionary drill, Delsarte exercises, massage, posturing, the manual of arms, cudgel or sword play, or the inchoate games that serve for the recreation of school children at recess time, the term means too little. For our present purpose physical training may be defined as "the regulated practice of some form of muscular exercise under such conditions as serve to promote the health of the organism or to develop and discipline its motor functions, either in a general or special way."

MEANING AND IMPORTANCE OF PHYSICAL TRAINING NOT GENERALLY APPREHENDED.

If it be true, as I have endeavored to show in the preceding pages, that the neural element is a necessary and dominant factor in muscular exercise, so called; that muscular movements serve as an index of the constitution and condition of motor brain centers, and may be made to serve as a means of securing the orderly and natural growth and development of those centers; that there is a definite order of evolution in the neuro-muscular mechanisms, as in the other somatic organs, and that the ages of more than two-thirds of the pupils in the public schools fall within the period just mentioned, it will hardly be gainsaid that the principles underlying systematized muscular exercise-which is physical training-are worthy of serious and careful consideration from all who are intrusted with the responsibility of determining the policy or of administering the practical affairs of elementary and secondary schools.

It is implicitly and explicitly denied by many that education is a science as well as an art. American educationists, as a class, have been rather disinclined to accept and apply the plain teachings of modern physiology and psychology with regard to the natural history of man and the mutual interdependence of his bodily and mental parts. It is perforce a slow and difficult matter for a class, many of whose leaders are not fully emancipated from the thraldom of an arrogant and overweening humanism, to readjust their aims and methods so that they shall harmonize with the results of proven science. It is vastly easier for them to regard the rising generation as mere adults in miniature, and to judge, admonish, and instruct children and youth in accordance with the standards of mental and moral excellence that obtain among men and women than it is to ascertain the essential characteristics which differentiate the child from the youth and both from adults, and to employ only such methods as are natural and appropriate to the age, sex, and individual peculiarities of their pupils. Moreover, "practical educators" have been loth to admit the legitimate claims of physical education, either as a branch of practical hygiene, or as a pedagogic discipline, for the reason that the subject has been ridiculously exploited at times by doctrinaires and dabblers as a safe, sure, and speedy means of hastening the millennium.

The motor element in all forms of instruction and practice is so large and vital; physical education has so many points of contact and such numerous and intricate relations with mental and moral training; the range in which its principles are applicable is so wide and diversified; and critical, comprehensive views regarding its nature and limitations are so little in demand that the larger and more weighty claims of physical training to the dignity and privileges of a coordinate department of education easily fail of recognition in the confusion due to the conflicting and often preposterous claims of the partisans of one or another "system" on the one hand and of self-elected "professors" and practioners of one or more of the thousand and one minor subdivisions of physical training of the other.

GENERAL AND SPECIAL FORMS OF PHYSICAL TRAINING.

Inasmuch as muscular exercise is resorted to for a variety of purposes, its aims may be classified as recreative, hygienic, educative, and remedial. In its wider sense physical training, therefore, includes childish games, athletic sports, gymnastics, manual training, and all forms of exercise that are employed, of set purpose, to develop motor ability of a special or professional sort. Success in language training, or in military, manual, and industrial training, is conditioned on the intelligence and skill with which the principles of physical training are applied by the teachers of those arts; since it is only through the assiduous drilling of their neuromuscular mechanisms that actors, elocutionists, musicians, marksmen, draftsmen, and penmen, as well as plowmen, boatmen, soldiers, and craftsmen are enabled to acquire their technique.

The great majority of the pupils in our schools are too unripe to profit from such mental training as is mainly technical; accordingly our schools are wisely organized for general and preparatory training. In the domain of physical education it is equally important not to confound general and special training either in thought or practice. Reason and experience forbid the substitution of military drill, sloyd, manual or elocutionary training for gymnastic and athletic training, or vice versa. It is unfortunate, to say the least, that the ardent advocates and promoters of specialized forms of motor education so often fail to appreciate the necessity of conforming their measures and methods to the laws of nature. The introduction of sloyd and manual training and of military drill into the curriculum of urban schools enhances and intensifies the need of school gymnastics and athletics, since it is demonstrable that sloyd, manual training, and the manual of arms, unless they are based upon and accompanied by sound bodily training of a more general nature, tend to produce awkwardness and deformity. Competent experts in surgery,

ophthalmology, and hygiene have shown that the customary systems of school seating aud the conventional methods of teaching penmanship are largely responsible for much of the impaired vision and spinal curvature found among school children. It is devoutly to be hoped that such intrinsically valuable branches of physical education as sloyd and manual training shall not, through haste and heedlessness, be rendered liable to similar criticism and attack.

Physical training, though an ancient art, is so new a science that even its most zealous advocates must admit that very much remains to be done before an exhaustive and absolutely satisfactory statement as to the hygienic and educational values of its leading general and special forms can be drawn up; but this condition of affairs does not justify indifference or aversion to efforts already initiated in various parts of the world for making good the losses which accrue to city children, as a class, from the deprivation of adequate facilities for play and exercise in the open air. Enough is known and has been proved by experience with regard to the nature and effects of muscular exercise, to warrant much more vigorous and comprehensive measures than have been taken as yet in any American city to secure the benefit of appropriate forms of physical training to the pupils in all grades of the public schools. To this end all efforts to add to the number of baths and of swimming schools, of playgrounds and gymnasia, or to enhance the efficiency of those we have, should be heartily seconded and promoted. If it were more generally the custom in American, as in many foreign cities, to provide the public schools with spacious grounds, well adapted to serve as play and gymnastic grounds, our school yards could be made much more serviceable than is at present possible in the interests both of formal and informal physical education.

Experience shows that out-of-door games, athletic sports, and systematic gymnastics are the forms of exercise which yield the best results in the physical training of school children. The plays of the kindergarten, the athletic sports to which British and American youth are so devoted, and the systematized gymnastics of the Swedes and Germans have all developed from one germ-from healthful play; the vital energy of that germ is found in the universal and ineradicable impulse of all healthy children to play.

CHARACTERISTIC FEATURES OF ATHLETICS AND GYMNASTICS.

In the athletic sports of young men we see the highest and fullest expression of the play instinct. The most essential difference between athletics and gymnastics is one of aim. The aim of athletics, unless they are of the illegitimate professional sort, is pleasurable activity for the sake of recreation; that of gymnastics is discipline or training for the sake of pleasure, health, or skill. We have but to compare the aims, methods, and results of each, and to call to mind the characteristics of the peoples that have most affected athletics on the one hand and gymnastics on the other, to perceive that gymnastics are more highly developed and present more features of educational value where large numbers are concerned. Gymnastics as compared with athletics are more comprehensive in their aims, more formal, elaborate. and systematic in their methods, and are productive of more solid and considerable results under the artificial and restrictive conditions of city life. I have no disposition to disparage athletic sports. I would that they were more general and better regulated than they are in our country. I believe that they are valuable as a means of recreation, that they conduce to bodily growth and improvement, and that their moral effects may be of great value, since they call for self-subordination, public spirit, and cooperative effort, and serve to reveal the dominant characteristics and tendencies as regards temper, disposition, and force of will of those who engage in them. But athletics bear so indelibly the marks of their childish origin, and are so crude and unspecialized and expensive in their methods, as to render them inadequate to meet the requirements of a thorough-going and comprehensive system of bodily education. The requirements of such a system demand a judicious admixture of

sports and gymnasties, of free play and formal guidance, to the end that each may help and reinforce the other.

No comprehensive system of physical training can be considered safe or rational whose exercises are not chosen and ordered so as to meet the varied and changing needs in respect to their sex, age, health, strength, and mental capacity of the individuals to be trained. The results which should be secured by such a system are briefly these: Easy and graceful carriage of the head and limbs; a broad, deep, and capacious chest, in which the heart and lungs, developed to their normal size and strength, shall have free, full, and regular play; square shoulders; a straight back; fully developed and well-rounded limbs, and the power to execute with ease, precision, and economy of force such movements as are involved in habitual actions, in the simpler exercises calling for strength and skill, and in the performance of ordinary gymnastic and athletic feats.

IMPORTANCE OF EDUCATIVE ENDS OF PHYSICAL TRAINING.

It is well to emphasize the beneficial effects of muscular exercise upon the nutrition of the body and its component parts, since in the last analysis health is very largely a matter of nutrition. I am not disposed to deny that ample justification for making physical training a coordinate branch of instruction in city schools is to be found in the undoubted efficacy of muscular exercise to promote general bodily health; but equally weighty arguments for the efficient organization and generous support of physical training may be derived from the educational value of systematized muscular exercise. Indeed, I am convinced, both from reflection and observation, that the hygienic ends of physical education can not be attained in full measure by instructors and trainers who do not recognize and strive to realize its educative ends as well.

Most teachers, unfortunately, derive their notions of exercise from text-books on physiology, since hitherto the normal schools have failed, for the most part, to furnish their pupils with sound and thorough instruction in either the theory or the art of physical training.

Says the late Du Bois-Reymond, for many years the professor of physiology in the University of Berlin:

We seek in vain in most physiological text-books for instruction respecting exercise. If it is given, only the so-called bodily exercises are generally considered and they are represented as merely exercises of the muscular system; therefore it is not strange that laymen in medicine, teachers of gymnastics, and school-teachers believe this. Yet it is easy to show the error of this view, and to demonstrate that such bodily exercises as gymnastics, fencing, swimming, riding, dancing, and skating are much more exercises of the nervous system, of the brain, and spinal marrow. It is true that their movements involve a certain degree of muscular power; but we can conceive of a man with muscles like those of the Farnesian Hercules who would yet be incompetent to stand or walk, to say nothing of his executing more complicated movements. For that we have only to add to our conception the power of arranging the motions suitably, and of causing them to work harmoniously. the bodily exercises we have mentioned above are not mere muscle gymnastics, but also, and that preeminently, nerve gymnastics, if, for brevity, we may apply the term nerves to the whole nervous system. Man is adapted to self improvement by means of exercise. It makes his muscles stronger and more enduring; his skin becomes fortified against all injury; through exercise his limbs become more flexible, his glands more productive; it fits his central nervous system for the most complicated functions; it sharpens his senses; and by it his mind, reacting upon itself, is enabled to augment its own elasticity and versatility.

All

If we once admit, as we must, that thought and feeling, judgment and volition, are inexpressible and ineffectual except through motor acts, and that motor acts are animated and controlled by the central nervous system, the inference is clear that physical training is an essential element in the development of mental health and power. Since motor acts, like mental acts, vary greatly in their nature and effects, equal educational value is no more to be ascribed to all forms of physical training than to all forms of mental training. This is tacitly recognized in practical lift.