THE VALUE OF COLLEGE ATHLETICS.

Testimony to the value and beneficial influence of college athletics, in view of recent discussions and a tendency of opposition to them that is shown in some quarters at the present time, is particularly valuable. The following statement of President Barnard of Columbia is positive and satisfactory and will go a good way in silencing the trivial objections of some eager reformers.

"I do not think," he says, "that the athletic exercises of the students interfere at all with their intellectual labors, but rather believe that they are of very decided benefit to the young men, augmenting their stock of health and increasing their powers of mental application. And as for their suffering physical injury from such relaxation, I have heard of nothing of the sort. I do not at all agree with what Chancellor Crosby said upon this subject in an address, or lecture, the other evening. It is a matter upon which I am hardly inclined to believe him hardly competent to speak, for he lacks experience. So far as I am aware, the University of New York has done nothing in the way of athletic sports and instead of speaking from experience, as we are qualified to do, he merely advances his hypothesis, based upon an imagined condition of facts. We have not found that a fondness for athletic exercises tended to render students indifferent to their progress in class, or influenced them, when exercising their right of selecting subjects of study, to choose easy branches or to diminish their application. On the contrary, we have had to restrain some of our athletes from undertaking more intense application to a wider range of study than we deemed advisable, and some of our brightest graduates have been men who distinguished themselves in athletic sports. Just at present we have no gymnasium in the college, because our old one has been temporarily torn away, but have made arrangements for the students in an excellent gymnasium near by, and we also maintain for them a boat club house on the Harlem river and grounds for their running, base-ball and foot-ball contests. I wish that I could persuade every student in the college to become a rowing man. I am sure it would do them all good.

Prof. Van Amringe of the same college is of the same opinion, and he voices the sentiments of his pupils when he says : "A student who will ever amount to anything as a student will not be hindered by a reasonable devotion to athletic sports, but, on the contrary, will be helped. He will not only be rendered stronger and healthier by his exercise, but he will be trained instinctively in qualities of promptitude of decision, impartiality of judgment, and readiness of action that will not only help him as a student, but be invaluable to him in after life. Students who are mentally dull do not gravitate to the athletic sports, or, if they do, are rejected there. Some time ago there was a young man, a member of the boat club, who could not seemingly keep up in his studies. The captain of the club said to him : 'You have got to keep up in your studies or get out of the club; we cannot afford to have anybody in here who drops behind.'"

We may also add to this testimony that of the Yale correspondent of the N. Y. Post, who has been investigating the subject and who reports that he "has consulted with some of the leading professors as to the effect of athletics on men's mental training, and invariably he has been told that it is highly beneficial. With the exception of a few days before the one or two great contests, they say that during the whole period of training the athletic men display wonderful quickness in apprehension, and work harder than the majority of their fellows who have nothing but their studies to take their time. Moreover, it gives vent, or rather direction, to that superabundance of animal spirits for which college students are noted, and which, in days before athletics became so prominent, gave much trouble to the instructors with injurious efforts to the whole college. Formerly it was displayed in 'town-and-gown' rows, rushing, and hazing; now it is disciplined by strictest training - a training which rigidly demands total abstinence from all that is injurious to body or mind - to turn it into some friendly, legitimate contest with other colleges."