EDITOR’S PREFACE.

The shore of physical education is strewn with the wrecks of systems and movements, many of them good in themselves, but left to drift when the personal support and enthusiasm of the founder was removed from the helm. It has only been when some great national crisis had to be faced and the minds of patriots and scholars were engaged in the effort to meet it, that systems have been evolved great enough to survive the death of their founder, the test of time and change in their national conditions. This is notably true of the gymnastics of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. Incomplete as systems of physical education without the addition of games, but logical and accurate in their application to the conditions they have had to meet, whenever similar conditions have arisen it is to them we have turned for inspiration and instruction, and nowhere was this better shown than in the great war of 1914, where crude masses of untrained and underdeveloped men had to be made quick and accurate in response to command and given that control of their bodies that is the true function of physical education in its highest sense.

To the sincere student of physical education nothing has a more sobering effect than the study of those advances made by the great men who have given their lives to their cause. He finds that most of the theories that come to him as new and startling have been thought before and have been either rejected or put into practice as well or better than he is likely to do, and so if he is a philosopher, he can avoid the inevitable failure of schemes that have been discarded and adapt from material of proved worth the material that suits his special conditions.

Such a study will save him from the outstanding characteristic of many exploiters of this subject, the unfounded claims for originality and novelty in their work. Small collections of free exercises are dignified as systems and published as such with apparent seriousness, slight variation of method is hailed as a great discovery, has its little day of notoriety and takes its place on the library shelves as a literary curiosity of interest only to the antiquarian, and the busy teacher has neither the time nor the inclination to separate the wheat from the chaff. Up to the present there have been but incomplete and fragmentary reports available for our guidance, often in translation, and frequently garbled by personal bias, so that the need has become more and more urgent for a complete and scholarly review of the growth and distribution of systems that are associated with certain names and certain periods.

Dr. Leonard is peculiarly fitted for such a great task. An enthusiastic scholar, with an intimate knowledge of the languages in which the originals were written, he has devoted the leisure and the vacations of thirty years to collecting, reading and making available rare and inaccessible works on the subject, for students of education in general and of physical education in particular. Repeated visits to Europe and pilgrimages to the shrines of the pioneers have given him the proper perspective, and this volume presents his conclusions as delivered in his yearly lecture courses at Oberlin and Harvard.

It comes appropriately early in a series of books designed to place physical education on an equality with other more strongly entrenched parts of a general educational system. The soul is indeed dead that does not react with a generous glow when reading the difficulties overcome and the work accomplished by the heroes of any field of endeavor, and what could be more inspiring at this time than to have set forth the conquests and defeats of those patriotic spirits whose lives have been given to upbuilding the health and fitness of the youth of the world, throughout the ages, as a guide and inspiration to us who have these same problems to meet at the present time.

R. Tait McKenzie, Editor.