TABLE NO. 14.-Apportionment of details at colleges, universities, etc., under section 1225, Revised Statutes.

Massachusetts.

1, 783, 012

University of Vermont, Burlington.

Massachusetts Agricultural College, Amherst..

Hampton Nor. and Agric. Inst., Hampton, Va.. July 1, 1884.
Bingham School, Orange County, N. C

South Carolina Military Institute, Charleston..

July 1, 1886.

July 1, 1886.

Agricultural and Mechanical College of Missis- July 1, 1886. sippi, Starkville.

First Lieut. Charles J. Crane, Twenty-fourth Infantry.. Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas, July 1, 1885.

near Bryan.

TABLE NO. 15.-Data contained in the reports of the officers detailed as military instructors at the institutions named.

* Great interest shown and much assistance given in military discipline; found essential to control

of pupils.

Though the Report of the Commissioner of Education does not group military schools by themselves, an examination of his Report for 1882-'83 shows that there were at least thirty institutions, other than those mentioned in the above list, in which military drill and discipline formed an essential feature.

During the year ending July 1, 1884, there were thirty-three officers of the army on duty at colleges, universities, and schools of superior instruction for young men.

633

ATHLETIC SPORTS IN THE UNITED STATES.

THE PRESENT CONTRASTED WITH THE PAST.

The grim and unjoyous ideals of the generations that conquered the wilderness and laid the foundation of the Republic have ceased to actu ate the mass of the community, if we may judge from the practices which now obtain all over the country with regard to recreation and amusements.

The value of play is a favored theme with writers on hygiene and education. The ardor and activity displayed by the undergraduate world in games and exercises once frowned upon by Faculties and boards of trust because of their "vain, idle, and flesh-pleasing " qualities, have become so great that it is the fashion in certain quarters to speak of many colleges as if they were schools for ball players, oarsmen, and athletes. There would be more point to such satire if the interest in athletics, which seems to strengthen year by year, were confined to the student class, instead of pervading the community as a whole. It is too often overlooked that the growth of college athletics has been stimulated and shaped by forces whose effects are equally, if not more strongly, marked on the non-scholastic classes of our population. Exhibitions and contests of every description which would not have been licensed or tolerated, much less pecuniarily supported, thirty years ago, now yield quick and large returns in popularity and cash to their promoters. Never, before the War and the profound changes that it has wrought upon the American mind and manners, would it have been possible for a single college class, or even a single college, to have raised $5,000 in one year for the maintenance of its representative athletes. Such a draft upon the imagination, as well as upon the pockets of the college public, would inevitably have gone to protest, and for precisely the same reasons that would have entailed disfavor and bankruptcy upon almost any of the professional athletic organizations which now flourish so on every hand that simply to name and classify them would prove wearisome.

ATHLETICS STIMULATED BY THE WAR.

The disbanded armies of the Republic furnished a large contingent of students who had been subjected to strenuous physical training, to the preparatory schools and colleges during the decade succeeding the war. The influence exerted by this contingent in reviving and developing the interest in physical culture, whose beginnings in the fifties and early sixties we have already noted, has been, perhaps, even more potent in