Democratic Sentinel, Volume 11, Number 47, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 16 December 1887 — Formative Effects of Different Kinds of Athletics. [ARTICLE]

Formative Effects of Different Kinds of Athletics.

What the gymnasium is doing for the strength and vigor of the masses in some of our institutions of learning may be inferred from a single illustration taken from the records at Harvard. University. In the year 1880, seven hundred and seventy-six men were physically examined. The strongest man out of this number showed in strength of lungs, back, legs, chest and arms, as indicated on the chart, a grand total of 675.2. At the close of the summer term of the present year, the highest strength test recorded was 1,272.8, and there were over two hundred men in college whose total strength test surpassed the highest test of 1880. This general gymnasium work is therefore reducing the one-sided development once so common, with athletic specialists. It must not be forgotten, however, that there is a development peculiar to the runner, jumper, wrestler, oarsman, gymnast, ball-plaver, heavy-lifter, etc., and any one familiar with" athletics at the present day can easily recognize one of these specialists. The same training that produced those matchless specimens of human development embodied in the statues of the Gladiator, the Athlete, Hercules, Apollo, and Mercury of old, would produce the same results under similar circumstances at the present time. With every kind of physical exercise, the qualities at first required are the qualities at length developed. Speed and endurance are required of the runner, and these are the qualities that come to him by practice. In a like manner, skill and activity come to the gymnast and ball-player; and strength and stability to the oarsman and weightthrower. Most of these qualities are accompanied by physical characteristics. If it were not for the recognized tendency of certain exercises to produce certain results, it would be impossible to prescribe special work for individual cases. All men, however, who practice athletics for the same length of time, and under similar conditions, do not attain identical results in their physical proportions or the same degree of success in their athletic achievements. In order to illustrate some of the distinguishing features that characterize the development of successful athletes, I have selected representative members of the different athletic organizations in the universities of Yale and Harvard, a few of whom distinguished themselves, within the last two years, by

breaking all previous college records for certain events. The photographs of these men, in spite of their dissimilarity, show us certain characteristics common to certain figures, and marked peculiarities of another kind will accompany others. Some of these characteristics are not readily detected by the eye, but appear distinctly in the charts.— D. A. Sargent, M. *D.. in Scribner’s Magazine.