Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

268 Track Athletics past your sides and you have the prince of chest expanders," etc., etc. 0 prince of chest ex– panders ! 0 vast roof and rope tangles ! 0 glorious great stationary springboard, ten feet long! Times have changed, indeed, and in these matters we are become sadly sophisticated. Even the undergraduates of those days must have been different if we are to accept the words of a writer. in the Out-ing of some twenty years or so ago. Speaking of the slowly growing interest in athletics and of Dr. Sargent, whom the con– temporary Harvard undergraduate, if we mistake not, irreverently dubs Dr. Sourgent and takes none too seriously, he says," His tolerant and well– balanced mind and personal popularity well fit him for working among college men, who often require a little coaxing and stimulus to draw them from their studies." The same observer mentions a hare-and-hound run which was tried at Cam– bridge in I 882 as "that Rugby sport," quaintly notes that Walter Soren "leaped nine feet six inches with the pole," and on viewing the young men at work on Jarvis Field in their parti– colored athletic clothes he is gravely reminded of the " picturesque crimson doctors' gowns of Oxford, England." The beginning was made toward a new order of things when the first races were held at Sara– toga, in July, 1874, as a sort of side exhibit to the