SOME ASPECTS OF ATHLETICS AND GYM- 
NASTICS AT HOME AND ABROAD. 
ADDRESS 
DELIVERED 
By Edward Mussey Hartwell, Ph. D., M. D., Director of 
Physical Training in the Public Schools 
of Boston, Mass. 
[Reprinted from the Proceedings of the American Institute of Instruc- 
tion, at the Annual Meeting, July, xBgi.] 
CONCORD, N. H.: 
Republican Press Association, Railroad Square 
iSgi- SOME ASPECTS OF ATHLETICS AND GYM- 
NASTICS AT HOME AND ABROAD. 
ADDRESS 
DELIVERED 
By Edward Mussey Hartwell, Ph. D., M. D., Director of 
Physical Training in the Public Schools 
of Boston, Mass. 
[Reprinted from the Proceedings of the American Institute of Instruc- 
tion, at the Annual Meeting, Jtdy, iBqil\ 
Republican Press Association, Railroad Square. 
1891. 
CONCORD, N.H.: ADDRESS. 
Mr. President, Ladies, and Gentlemen : I am to 
speak to you this evening conceining “ Some Aspects 
of Athletics and Gymnastics, at Home and Abroad.” I 
shall consider some of the more salient peculiarities 
of school games and school gymnastics, as they are 
practised to-day in England, Germany, and Sweden. 
For the purpose of giving fuller and clearer effect to 
my descriptions of schools, play-grounds, gymnasia, 
and forms of exercise, I shall supplement my re- 
marks by exhibiting to you a series of lantern-views, 
which have recently been prepared to illustrate this 
subject. 
Before entering upon the discussion of specific 
forms of athletic and gymnastic exercise, I beg to in- 
vite your attention to a consideration, in a very gen- 
eral way, of the nature and effects of exercise and of 
the most typical national systems of physical train- 
ing. 
According to modern physiology, the human body 
is an aggregation of a vast number of individual cells 
which differ from one another in lineage, form, and 
function. These individuals are so grouped with 4 
relation to one another in our various organs, that the 
body as a whole is to be considered as a communal 
structure, a sort of federal union of tissues and organs. 
Again, the body as a whole is a machine in which the 
potential energy of organized material is transformed 
into the work which we see manifested in mo- 
tion, animal heat, and the chemical actions involved 
in nutritive, secretory, and excretory processes. It is 
estimated that the tissue-changes, of which an adult 
human body weighing one hundred and forty pounds 
is normally the seat, involve the transformation of 
more than a ton of material in the course of a year. 
Muscular activity is one of the chief agents in pro- 
moting tissue-changes in all the bodily organs and in 
determining the normal growth and development of 
the organism as a whole. 
speaking, the skeletal muscles and the 
skeleton constitute the working or executive machin- 
ery of the bodily organism. The most obvious result 
of orderly and well regulated exercise is seen in the 
normal growth and development of the executive ma- 
chinery itself. In this connection, it is well to recall 
the all-important fact that none of the skeletal mus- 
cles is a simple organ. Every skeletal muscle is 
made up of two conjoined mechanisms : a contrac- 
tile, executive mechanism, the muscle proper, and a 
stimulating, regulative mechanism consisting of nerve 
fibres and gray matter nerve cells. In other words, 
the executive machinery of the body is indissolubly 
bound to the nervous system and is animated and 
governed by it. The muscular and nervous tissues 
have been well termed the “ master tissues.” In this 
sense nervous tissue may be characterized as “ the 5 
masterful tissue.” All other tissues, omitting the in- 
different and supportive tissues, such as bone and car- 
tilage, may be classed under the head of “ tissues of 
digestion ” or “ tissues of excretion ”—which are the 
terms used by the English physiologist, Michael 
Foster, who points out that “ the whole of the rest of 
the body is engaged (i) in so preparing the raw food, 
and so bringing it to the nervous and muscular tissues, 
that they may build it up into their own substance 
with the least trouble ; and (2) in receiving the waste 
matters which arise in muscular and nervous tissues, 
and preparing them for rapid and easy ejection from 
the body.” 
The muscular system has, then, two sets of servants, 
its purveyors and its scavengers. The former prepare 
and serve the master tissues with food-materials, and 
the latter clear away the refuse matters which result 
from the chemical and mechanical processes by which 
the functional activity of the executive machinery is 
signalized. The digestive and assimilative organs 
and the arterial section of the organs of circulation 
and respiration belong to the first class; and the 
venous section of the circulatory and respiratory or- 
gans, the perspiratory, and the urinary organs consti- 
tute the second. The purveyor and scavenger tissues 
serve each other as well as the master tissues, it may 
be remarked, and are, like the muscles, controlled by 
the Archaeus of the body, if we may so denominate 
the nervous system. 
Next to the movements due to muscular action, the 
most direct and obvious effects of exercise are 
increased circulation and ventilation of the blood. 
The effect of exeixise upon the processes of digestion, 6 
sanguification, and excretion is an indirect one ; those 
processes being modified, so far as muscular activity 
is concerned, by the changes wrought by it in the vol- 
ume, distribution, or character of the general blood- 
stream. But the most important effect of muscular 
exercise, though it is usually overlooked, is to be 
found in the structural and functional improvement of 
the nervous system, or rather so much of it as is con- 
cerned in the regulation and control of the skeletal 
muscles. Lack of time forbids my undertaking to 
fully elucidate this point, though there is abundant 
and most conclusive evidence that the brain, spinal 
cord, and nerves depend, for their structural integrity 
and functional power, very largely upon the normal 
working of their executive end organs, the skeletal 
muscles. 
The effects of exercise upon a single muscle are 
chiefly two. On the one hand, there results a general 
condition which may be termed the heightened health 
of the neuro-muscular machine, which state of health 
involves the attainment and maintenance of a nor- 
mal degree of size, strength, and working power in 
its structural parts ; and, on the other hand, a more 
complex and special effect, viz.,—the acquisition or 
organization by its neural parts of proper habits as 
regards the origination, transmission, and regulation 
of stimuli. The ends of exercise may be character- 
ized, then, as the promotion of health and the acquisi- 
tion of correct habits of action. The first is a hygienic 
end, while the second is a distinctly educational end. 
It matters not whether we consider a single muscle, 
which admits of only a single limited motion, or a 
group of muscles, or the communal structure we call 7 
the human body, or a class of school-children, or a 
foot-ball team, or a regiment of soldiers. The ends of 
exercise in each case are the same and can only be 
attained by a combination of hygienic and educational 
measures. 
The main field of education is the nervous s}rstem, 
and the principles of all forms of physical training, 
however various and divergent their special ends may 
be, are based upon the power of the nervous system 
to receive impressions and register them or their 
effects ; in other words, upon its ability to memorize 
the part it has played in acquired movements, and on 
occasion to recall and revive such movements. 
It is coming to be clearly recognized that the func- 
tion of our public and preparatory schools and col- 
leges is not to fit their scholars to engage as specialists 
in either intellectual, commercial, or industrial pur- 
suits. The same rule holds good as to the kind, or 
rather degree, of physical training which should be 
aimed at in our schools and colleges. It is not their 
business to train up ball-players, carpenters, clerks, or 
professionals of any kind. General bodily training is 
the kind demanded ; but training so general that it is 
vaguely, or spasmodically, or half-heartedly carried 
out, or worse still, that is left to run itself in accord- 
ance with the whim or frenzy of the persons to be 
trained, will surely and deservedly fall short of suc- 
cess. Intelligence, system, organization, funds, and 
patience are just as indispensable in physical training 
as in the training of engineers, musicians, or philol- 
ogians. 
Pastimes, out-of-door sports, and systematic gym- 
nastics are the forms of exercise which yield the best 8 
results in the physical training of school children and 
college students. The plays of the kindergarten, the 
athletic sports to which British and American youth 
are so devoted, and the systematic gymnastics of the 
Swedes and Germans have all developed from one 
germ, from healthful play, that is; the vital energy of 
this germ is found in the ineradicable impulse of all 
healthy children to play. 
In the athletic sports of young men, we see the 
fullest expression of the play instinct. The essential 
difference between athletics and gymnastics is one of 
aim. The aim of athletics, unless of the illegitimate 
professional sort, is pleasurable activity for the sake of 
recreation or rivalry ; that of gymnastics is discipline 
or training for pleasure, health, and skill. We have 
but to compare the aims, methods, and results of these 
two departments of exercise and to call to mind the 
characteristics of the nations which have affected ath- 
letics on the one hand and gymnastics on the other, 
to perceive that gymnastics are more highly developed 
and present more features of educational value. Gym- 
nastics, as compared with athletics, are more compre- 
hensive in their aims, more formal, elaborate, and sys- 
tematic in their methods, and are productive of more 
solid and considerable results. 
I have no disposition to disparage athletic sports. 
I would that they were more general and better regu- 
lated than they are in our country. I believe that they 
are valuable as a means of recreation ; that they con- 
duce to bodily growth and improvement; and that 
their moral effects are of great value, since athletic 
sports call for self-subordination, public spirit, and 
co-operative effort and serve to reveal the dominant 9 
characteristics and tendencies, as regards the temper, 
disposition, and force of will of those who 
engage in them. But they bear so indelibly the 
marks of their childish origin, they are so narrow and 
vain-glorious in their aims, so crude and unspecialized 
as to their methods, as to render them inadequate for 
the purposes of a thorough-going and broad system of 
bodily education. It is well to promote them and it 
is becoming increasingly necessary to regulate them ; 
but it is unwise and short-sighted to consider them as 
constituting anything more than a single stage in the 
best bodily training. 
Gymnastics have been most popular and general 
among the most highly trained nations, such as the 
Greeks of old and the Germans of to-day. The most 
athletic, and at the same time one of the most ill- 
trained, of modern nations, is the British. I mean 
simply this : that an Englishman believes, and acts on 
the belief, that one comes to do a thing right by doing 
it, and not by first learning to do it right and then 
doing it; whereas the Germans and Swedes leave 
little or nothing to the rule of thumb, not even in 
bodily education. 
It seems to me that the most representative and typi- 
cal forms of physical training are five in number and 
may be styled : (i) the Grecian ; (2) the Mediaeval or 
Knightly ; (3) the British ; (4) the German ; and (5) 
the Ling or Swedish. 
In speaking of the most general features of the five 
types or national systems under review, it will be con- 
venient to use the terms agonistic, gymnastic, and 
athletic, which are derived from Grecian usage. An 
dycov [agon] meant originally an assembly ; then, an assembly to witness a contest of some sort. For in- 
stance, the Olympic games were gymnic agones, 
being so called because the agonists and antagonists 
were yopyoi [gymnoi] or naked. The prizes given to 
victorious agonists were termed ahXa [athla], and the 
term athlete came to be used to designate a winner, 
or contestant; later, an athlete, in the worst sense of 
the word, was a prize-fighter governed by professional 
and mercenary ends. A gymnast was a trainer 
primarily, especially after the agonistic games had 
become systematized and regulated. 
Greek physical training was, then, agonistic, dur- 
ing the period of its growth, when its main purpose 
was to afford sport or pastime; it was gymnastic, 
during the period of its best estate, about the time of 
Pericles, when its aims were distinctly educational 
and ethical; and it became athletic in the worst sense 
of the word, during the decadence of the institutions 
and independent life of the Greeks, when a spirit 
of mercenary self-seeking and brutal professionalism 
dominated both gymnasts and athletes. 
Using these words in the sense indicated above, we 
should term the martial exercises and games of the 
ancient Gauls and Romans agonistic. Out of these 
sports and exercises, were developed the physical 
training of the young page and squire and the chival- 
ric tournaments and justs, to which the knights of 
Italy, France, Germany, Britain, and Scandinavia 
were so devoted in feudal times. That training and 
those contests were partly agonistic and partly athletic 
in their nature. The same terms may be applied to 
British sports. They were agonistic and have become 
chiefly athletic within the last seventy-five or one him- 11 
dred years. Athleticism is the dominant note in all 
British jffiysical training, which has but little of peda- 
gogical aim or method in it and is even less deserving 
of being called gymnastic than was the mediaeval sort 
of physical training. German turning is somewhat 
agonistic in character, though its aims and methods 
are gymnastic, in the main. No modern system of 
physical training so well deserves to be styled gym- 
nastic as does the Swedish system, which has scarcely 
enough of the athletic element in it. In the Swedish 
gymnastics, moreover, we find a high place accorded 
to medical gymnastics. Indeed, excepting the Gre- 
cian, no system of medical gymnastics worthy the 
name is to be found outside of Swedish gymnastics. 
For our present purpose, we may take the Grecian 
and British systems of bodily training as affording the 
most typical expression of the gymnastic and the ath- 
letic idea respectively. Although differing widely in 
most respects, these two systems are alike in being 
devoid of any admixture of elements acquired through 
imitation or borrowing. British sports reflect more 
fully, perhaps, than any modern system of physical 
training, the national spirit of their devotees. They 
are the necessary inherited pastimes of a manly, vigor- 
ous, self-sufficient folk ; and have never fully outgrown 
or lost their primitive, not to say pagan, characteris- 
tics. They have been followed largely for their own 
sake and have suffered but slight modification through 
the influence of innovating educators and thinkers, 
presenting, in this respect, a marked contrast to Ger- 
man turning and Swedish gymnastics, which, though 
they bear the impress of national feeling, have been 
developed chiefly of set purpose on the part of their 12 
promoters, either as a means for national regeneration 
or as a remedy for over-refinement and the deteriorat- 
ing effects of sedentary and urban life. Such modi- 
fications as are inevitable in British sports are due 
mostly to efforts to make them more social and general, 
in short more truly popular. Then, too, the English 
climate is singularly favorable for the pursuit of athletic 
sports. The summer is so cool and the winter is 
usually so mild, in England, that there are compara- 
tively few days in the year, when one may not, if he 
will, engage in out-of-door games of some sort. 
Indeed, the climate, more than most climates, acts as 
an incentive or provocative to active exercise. Mus- 
cular activity is more conducive to comfort than is 
quiescence or loafing, in most varieties of English 
weather. Riding is always in season. Foot-ball is 
practicable, not only throughout the autumn and win- 
ter,—in ordinary winters,—but also far into the spring. 
Rowing may be practised during more than three 
quarters of the year. Cricket, being dependent on 
the state of the turf, is little played but in the spring 
and summer. 
The English public schools are peculiarly adapted 
to serve as nurseries of the national pastimes. The 
oldest of them, Winchester and Eton, were originally 
ecclesiastical foundations and have served, in a measure, 
as models for most of the later foundation schools, 
which as a class have departed less widely from their 
mediaeval prototypes than have the secondary schools 
on the continent. In England, the public schools,which 
are boarding schools for boys from 10 or 12 to 19 years 
of age, enjoy a practical monopoly of secondary edu- 
cation. On the continent, if we except the French Lycdes, high class boarding schools for boys are the 
exception. Moreover, the continental standard of intel- 
lectual training is higher and the methods of instruc- 
tion more exacting and severe, so that pupils in a 
German, Swiss, or Scandinavian Gymnasium, or in a 
French Lycee, have much less freedom and leisure 
than the boys at Eton, Winchester, or Rugby, where 
the half-holidays average three a week. Force of 
public opinion generally, and often the rules of the 
school, oblige the English boy to take part in the 
school games. Owing to the combined influence of 
tradition, public opinion, and the peculiar organization 
of the schools and universities, which set the tone in 
the athletic world, British interest in British sports, 
by reason of its universality, intensity, and intelligence, 
stands alone. Though teachers and governing boards 
are sympathetic and helpful as a rule, British athletics, 
as an institution, have been shaped chiefly by succes- 
sive generations of boys and “ Old Boys,” as public- 
school graduates are wont to be called. It is doubtful 
if school and college athletics will ever be properly 
managed in this country, before a generation of teach- 
ers, presidents, and trustees shall arise, who have en- 
joyed the advantages of athletic training in their youth. 
As regards length of days, British sports come next 
to the Grecian games. The tournaments and justs of 
the Middle Ages lasted scarcely 400 years; German 
turning took its rise in the last quarter of the last cen- 
tury ; Swedish gymnastics have not reached their 
ninetieth birthday ; but the history of the Grecian 
games extends over nearly 1400 years, from the days 
of Homer till 394 A. D., the date assigned to the last 
celebration of the Olympic games. In the breadth and sanity of its aim, in the magni- 
tude of its proportions, and the completeness of its de- 
velopment as a national institution, in the perfection 
of its organization, in the splendor and solemnity of 
its festivals, in its many-sided and abiding influence, 
as well as in the length of its history and the brilliancy 
of its record, the physical training of the Greeks has 
no parallel. Its history forms a coherent whole, pre- 
senting wmll marked phases of growth, culmination, 
and decay and reflecting at every stage the spirit of 
the nation. Athletic contests entered into the worship 
of Greek gods and heroes, and the lapse of time was 
reckoned in Olympiads to mark the recurrence of the 
principal sacred games. Gymnastics were assigned 
an enlarged and honorable place in the training, both 
for peace and war, of every free-born boy and youth. 
The codes of Lycurgus and Solon provided for the 
organization and regulation of bodily training; and 
the management of it, during its best estate, afforded 
positions of honor and emolument to distinguished 
and ambitious men. It furnished themes for poets, 
philosophers, and historians. Sculptors and painters 
sought the palaestra and gymnasium for their fairest 
models, and even the gi’eatest of Greek physicians 
thought it no condescension to study and adopt exer- 
cises and procedures which had been originated by 
paedotribes and gymnasts. 
The principal exercises taught in the palaestra and 
the gymnasium were: running, leaping, wrestling, 
throwing the discus, hurling the spear, boxing, and 
the pancration, a combination of boxing and wrest- 
ling. Various games of bail were in vogue, and much 
attention was paid to swimming and bathing. The Greek training was severe, that of candidates for the 
Olympic games lasting for ten months. It was most- 
ly conducted in the open air, often under a blazing 
sun. In their practice exercises and in their matches, 
the athletes were naked. They were oiled and sanded 
before their exercise and scraped with a strigil, sham- 
pooed, and bathed after it. Their dietary was also 
carefully regulated ; so, too, were their hours of sleep 
and practice. In none other of our five national sys- 
tems of exercise, has “training” been carried to so 
high a pitch or been so well ordered, as it was among 
the Greeks. So far as I know, no especial attention was 
paid to dietetic rules by the contestants in either 
knightly or popular games in the Middle Ages ; and 
“ training,” in the sense in which it is employed by 
those who are addicted to British sports, has practically 
no followers in Germany or Scandinavia, outside the 
ranks of professional acrobats and Anglomaniacs. 
But the Greek gymnasium was much more than 
an aggregation of wrestling pits, running tracks, exer- 
cise halls, and bathing establishments, surrounded by 
colonnades and shady walks. The Athenian gymna- 
sia were clubs and schools as well, provided with 
lecture halls and quiet nooks, to which the young 
men and elders of the city resorted for instruction and 
social intercourse. It is noteworthy that, even among 
the Greeks, the word palaestra came to mean a 
school; and that the most highly educated of modern 
peoples, the Germans, designate the highest of their 
secondary schools by the term gyrjinasium. The 
French word Lycee, derived from Lyceum the name 
of the gymnasium in which Socrates and Aristotle 
taught philosophy, is used in the same sense as the 16 
German gymnasium. Antisthenes, the founder of 
the Cynic school of philosophy, taught in the Kynos- 
arges gymnasium. The masters in art and science, 
the world over, are content to be styled academicians, 
in memory of the Academy of Plato, which was one 
of the public gymnasia of Athens, 
No modern nation has been or is likely to be leav- 
ened with the Greek leaven. The Grecian type ofphys- 
ical training has never been reproduced. It must 
ever remain unique, for the same reasons that forbid 
us to look for the rise of a new Sparta or a second 
Athens. Of modern forms of physical training, the 
Swedish and the German have more of the broad, 
idealizing, pedagogical spirit that characterized Greek 
gymnastics, than has the British. Each of these 
national systems of physical training presents an 
interesting and instructive field for study, especially 
as each of them has exerted and still exerts a marked 
influence upon the minds of those who are concerned 
about the bodily education of American youth. It is 
well to remember, however, that British athletics 
have been created by the British boy, who has forced 
his masters to grant him place and time for his sports, 
sometimes at the expense of the school programme ; 
while the school and military gymnastics, which 
enter into the training of the Swedes and Germans, 
have been devised by the teaching class and imposed 
as school tasks upon the taught. Naturally enough, 
the American boy, in school and college, is more 
emulous ofhis British cousin, than ofhis more remote 
kindred, the Teutonic or Scandinavian pedagogue. 
We come now to a closer consideration of some of 
the more striking features of athletics and gymnastics, as they are practised in England, Germany and 
Sweden. I will not detain you with any detailed 
comparison between Swedish and German school 
gymnastics, as I shall have occasion, in my remarks 
upon the lantern views which follow, to note the 
differences which characterize British, German, and 
Swedish methods and usage. I have said nothing of 
American systems of physical training, for the reason 
that as yet no comprehensive native system of Ameri- 
can gymnastics and athletics has been evolved. 
There are numerous partial and inchoate schemes; 
but none of them is likely to supplant or supersede 
any of the modern national systems of which I have 
spoken. The American system, when it comes, will 
probably be an eclectic system, combining the athletic 
element found in British and American sports, the 
pedagogical principles and procedures of the Swedish 
school gymnastics, and certain features peculiar to 
the popular gymnastics of the Germans. 
A large number of lantern-slides were then shown, 
for the purpose of setting forth the essential differences 
between athletic sports and school gymnastics. 
By means of views, taken from antique statues and 
vase-paintings, attention was called to the type of men 
produced by Greek athletics and gymnastics. Modern 
types were illustrated by means of group-pictures of 
English, French, and German school boys. Eton 
and Rugby being chosen as representative English 
schools, some of their peculiarities as to organization 
and management were noted ; the facilities afforded 
their pupils for engaging in cricket, foot-ball, rackets, 
fives, swimming, and rowing were described ; and 
their most striking features illustrated by views of grounds, buildings, and players. Rowing, as being 
one of the most characteristic of British sports, 
received especial attention from the speaker, who 
made use of a full series of Instantaneous views of 
aquatic sports at Oxford and Cambridge, Views of 
German and Swedish schools, gymnasts, gymnasia, 
gymnastic exercises and apparatus followed ; and the 
two systems of training were contrasted. 
In conclusion, views of several of the most typical 
of American college gymnasia were shown. Atten- 
tion was called to the fact that American educational 
authorities had attempted but little and accomplished 
less, toward building up a genuine system of physical 
education based on sound pedagogical principles and 
the best experience ; although they had shown much 
zeal and not a little extravagance, especially among 
the in erecting buildings and laying out 
grounds for athletic and gymnastic purposes. It was 
also stated that the most expensive and best planned 
gymnasia in the world, for the use of girls and women, 
are to be found in America. The teaching in the 
best of the gymnasia for women is in the hands, 
either of Swedes, or of those who have adopted Swed- 
ish methods. Just at this juncture, the women’s col- 
leges and the public schools of Boston, Chicago, 
Cleveland, and Kansas City are clearly in the lead of 
the schools and colleges for men, as regards the adop- 
tion of sound and successful methods of instruction in 
physical training. There is a crying need, from the 
primary school to the university, for genuine teaching 
in this department. Given well-trained and well-pai'd 
teachers, and the questions pertaining to brick and 
mortar and machinery will take care of themselves.