form to certain standards of height and weight. But, as Mr. Cecil Hawkins has shown, such an assumption is not justified. The average weight of a very large number of boys of any given age may of course be taken, but this number may include boys of very abnormal or very deficient growth, and the average being affected by such, is obviously not a reliable unit. If any unit be taken as a standard it must be the mean measurement or weight between the extremes, and not the average; but for practical purposes it would be probably sufficient to know the limits of growth for any such given age, and marking these to note: (1) Whether a particular boy is within these limits, and (2) Whether his growth from year to year is reasonably continuous. Unfortunately at present we are without any such guide at all. Mr. C. Hawkins has, I believe, drawn up reliable tables for the weights and measurements of boys of the public school age. We should welcome any attempt to draw up similar tables for those of boys at preparatory schools. As matters now stand we have to be content to watch carefully the continuous growth of our boys. They come to us with varying antecedents and varying constitutions. It is reasonable to expect that under healthy conditions they will show a steady annual rate of growth. The rate will be found to vary from one to three inches per annum, with proportional increase of weight and chest measurement. I have noticed that the rate of increase is not maintained in some boys equally during all parts of the year. And, in order to watch this it is necessary to take measurements not less than three times a year, i.e., once a term. Six times a year gives more satisfactory results, but so long as the annual increase is steady and a boy is generally healthy and in good condition, it does not seem a matter of importance whether the increase is evenly distributed over the 12 months, or is more rapid at some parts of the year and almost absent at others. Growth, however, is a matter of bone and framework, and is dependent on sufficiency of food and general conditions. Training has to concern itself with the due development of muscle in the right place, and with the control of limbs. What measures are taken at the ordinary preparatory school to secure these objects?

Physical training primarily suggests the gymnasium, and I do not suppose that any school considers itself efficiently equipped until it has some sort of gymnasium. But the preparatory school gymnasium has, and I think should have, two very distinct and special uses. It is, first, the place of drill and gymnastic instruction; of the various systems of drill in use I cannot with any confidence say which is best. In some schools the drill is conducted by the masters or by one of them who has made a special study of the subject; more frequently the assistance of a drill sergeant and gymnastic instructor is called in. My own experience shows that, as with all kinds of instruction, drill is popular or the reverse according to the instructor's power of enlisting attention by brightness of manner and variety of exercises, but that with the best of sergeants it is not much liked except by a very limited number of boys. Of actual gymnastics it may perhaps

4333.

Y 2

be doubted whether small boys should be asked to do much. It is generally I believe thought not, but so much at least I think should be taught to every boy as will enable him to climb a rope or pole with confidence, to swing from either hand on a rope, or to pull up to a bar or ledge, in a word to overcome the natural timidity of childhood, and to give such firmness and confidence to his system as is necessary for the ordinary situations in which in his birdsnesting or exploring expeditions he may be likely to find himself. It may sound childish to ask this of an English boy, but I do not know the nursery which provides such exercises, and only very few homes in which the opportunity for them is to be found: and I do know that quite a large proportion of the boys of nine to ten years of age can with difficulty hangat full arms' length from a bar, and so far from being able to pull themselves up to a position of security, can only maintain their hanging position for a few seconds, and then drop like an over-ripe pear in an exhausted condition to the ground. Therefore they want gymnastics as well as drill.

But there is another use for the gymnasium which seems to me of no less importance. It is the covered playground of the school; such a place as is absolutely necessary during the winter terms when there are long and dull afternoons to fill up, and spirits to let off. And as such it should, I think, have some at least of the gymnastic apparatus always ready for use. The more formal vaulting horse and parallel and horizontal bars are best out of the way. Uninstructed efforts on these are undoubtedly dangerous, but swings and ropes and hanging rings are in the first place the sum of delight, and moreover provide in an especial way a splendid opportunity for the exercise of that monkey-like activity which it has been the object of the formal drill and gymnastics to develop. It is probably wiser that a master should be present at such times, and he generally is. It is easy to stop at once any too risky efforts, but he should use great discretion in doing so, for the risks are very small if the boys are not made nervous by overcautioning, and the gain in freedom of limb and general activity traceable to the "monkeyhouse" use of the gymnasium is quite out of proportion to the danger incurred.

Under the head of physical training I suppose should be placed the singing and dancing classes in vogue at many schools. As a means towards the proper use of lungs and voice organs on the one hand, and towards rhythmical movement and what used to be called deportment, on the other, these are no doubt of use. I cannot speak from experience of the results of either as a systematic exercise.

But before all and above all must be placed, I suppose, the regular school games as the paramount force in physical training at the preparatory as at the public schools. We have been accused of allowing the games to assume so great an importance in our eyes that the victims of our zeal know no relaxation. That when we are not urging to greater mental effort in the classroom, we are hounding on our hapless pupils to a greater

bodily effort in the playground; that the school matches assume an altogether undue value in our own eyes, and consequently in the eyes of our pupils. If it be so, it is an unfortunate and self-defeating oversight in our organisation; but I do not believe it to be a true bill at all. That we do consider that a good school eleven and a good school spirit in all our games are essentials of good and healthy school life we would do more than admit; we should be the first to assert it. To prove that our efforts to secure this are not occasionally overstrained would be a thankless task, but that the zeal for games which induces grown men and first-class athletes to devote hour after hour and day after day to the eager and intelligent instruction of small boys is either waste of time or in any way to be blamed is a difficult. thing to believe. By it the small boy learns, as those who have not seen it would marvel to see, the free use of shoulder and arm and leg and eye, and above all the mysteries of "timing and of instructive co-operation, which go far on the road not only of physical but of moral education. It is apart from the purposes of this article to discuss this branch of physical training at length, nor do I at all assert that the athletic sense of the age is not overburdened; but it would be a grave omission were no mention to be made of this greatest and essentially English branch of the subject. I believe myself that the zeal for games now to be seen in English schools is wholly good.

In the

pressure of the intellectual side of school life is to be found the greatest safeguard against games becoming to the majority the paramount interest. And if this be in reality a danger, is it for a moment to be weighed against the evils of loafing which that insidious suggestion of more leisure too frequently covers ?

Such are in outline the principal methods of physical training in preparatory schools. In a minor degree under this heading should be classed the training of hand and eye in the carpentry class, and in the various branches of natural history open to small boys at school. When a boy myself I attended at the village carpenter's shop at stated times during the holidays to be taught to carpenter." I did, I believe, achieve one or two Oxford picture frames and a dovetailed box, but I should be sorry to say now how much of either was done by myself and how much by my instructor. Many years ago I saw a school carpenter's shop conducted on the same principles; many and beautiful frames and brackets and cupboards were turned out during the term's course and were exhibited doubtless as "my work" during the holidays; but I happened to pay my visit at an off time shortly before the holidays, and came upon my friend the carpenter just "tidying up' the young gents' work," and I thought little of the carpenter's shop as an educational medium; but I have seen that it can be bettered. I have watched a conscientious instructor, of the class employed in the technical classes under the County Council, from week to week taking a clumsy-handed class of ten or a dozen awkward-fingered boys up from the first mysteries of sawing straight and planing true, to the higher intricacies of mortising and dovetailing, and

342 Health and Physical Training in Preparatory Schools.

above all of setting out work, and to a divine discontent with an unfinished or badly-turned-out job, and I have seen that the carpenter's shop is one of the best and most valuable of the school departments. The two things that are absolutely necessary for success are a really conscientious trained instructor who will not touch the work himself, and will insist on all work being subject to his scrutiny and criticism, before being pronounced finished.

There is much to be said of the training in observation and quickness of eye to be learned during country walks, and in the collection of birds' eggs or butterflies, or wild flowers, and yet I hardly think this can be dignified by the title of physical training. In the first place, though interest in such pursuits should be, and is always encouraged, instruction in them is never, I think, compulsory and rarely systematically given, and in the second place it is almost impossible to assign any definite place or time in the school curriculum to them. They are therefore to be noted only as among the bye-paths of training proper. In the same category may perhaps be placed the long paper chases and runs which take place in many schools. Of these my experience has been unfortunate. They were probably ill-organised, and were certainly found to be fatiguing, so that I am possibly inclined to underrate their value.

In conclusion I would say that in the preceding pages I seem to myself to have touched on many of the most trivial and perhaps rudimentary parts of a preparatory schoolmaster's work. To others much of what I have written may have come by intuition. By some like myself it has been bought by experience. For neither of these classes should I have presumed to categorise the elements of their profession; but if to those outside the profession, whether the public which has sons to educate, or others who are interested in secondary education, I have succeeded in conveying the notion that there is more for a schoolmaster to do than, as was said to me this very afternoon, "make money for a certain number of years, and then sit down and enjoy it," then at least I shall claim to have in part, fulfilled that which I was asked to perform.

C. T. WICKHAM.

GAMES IN PREPARATORY SCHOOLS,

(CRICKET, FOOTBALL, ATHLETIC SPORTS, PAPER CHASES, RUNS, GOLF, CYCLING, SWIMMING.)

Upwards of forty years ago I entered upon my first experience of Preparatory School life, an experience similar, no doubt, to that of many of my contemporaries, though differing materially from that of men of younger standing: the system was then in its infancy, the public schools still absorbed a considerable proportion of the annual supply of ten-year-old boys, and although Preparatory Schools did exist here and there, they were mainly small in size and forerunners rather than types of the vast host that has followed them, largely based on oldfashioned principles, and only tentatively admitting the more modern ideas that were beginning to be ventilated. At all events, so far as my experience went, the schoolroom was the school; we ate (on a most liberal scale in our case; others may have been less fortunate), we breathed fresh air (for 13 hours daily), we slept (for nearly 10 hours) in order that we might return to the classroom for work; that work was enforced by coercive measures which were as simple as they were rigorous; they passed uncriticised as being natural and foreordained; in the sweat of our face we ate bread, and the child was not spoiled for want of the rod. Like the other ten-year-olds I sat from 6.30 until 1.0 with only a single half-hour's interval for breakfast; neither better nor worse than the others, I experienced the frequent application of the most primitive instrument of instruction, and the hand that applied it was that of an earnest, generous, and warm-hearted master, who, if he spared us little, spared himself yet less.

It was a small school, and our games were neither organised nor supervised in the modern sense; indeed, they occupied too subsidiary a position. Nature, for reasons of her own, demanded a daily tribute of bodily offices, and among them the respiration of fresh air and the exercise of muscular tissue; Nature should not be baulked of her due; but the sooner such animal needs. were satisfied, the sooner we got back to real business. A stern system, perhaps, but faithfully carried out in what were considered our best interests, and accompanied by unlimited. personal kindness.

If my experience should seem to have been exceptional, I can only say that within my small horizon it tallied with that of my elders, as recounted by them, and that I knew no other: the legend that first met my eyes at my Public School echoed the