Have I exaggerated the evils of intercollegiate athletics? Possibly I have. Exceptions should be cited here and there. But I am convinced that college faculties agree with me in my main contentions. My impression is that at least three fourths of the teachers I have met the country over believe that the American college would better serve its highest purposes, if intercollegiate athletics were no more. At a recent dinner of ten deans and presidents, they declared, one by one, in confidence, that they would abolish intercollegiate athletics if they could withstand the pressure of students and alumni.
Is it therefore necessary for all institutions to give up intercollegiate athletics permanently? Probably not. Let our colleges first adopt whatever measures may be necessary to make athletics yield their educational values to all students and teachers. If intercollegiate athletics can then be conducted as incidental and contributory to the main purposes of athletics, well and good. But first of all the question must be decisively settled, which aims are to dominate—those of business or those of education. And it will be difficult for a college already in the clutches of commercialism to retain the system and at the same time cultivate a spirit antagonistic to it. Probably the quicker and surer way would be to suspend all intercollegiate athletics for a college generation by agreement of groups of colleges—during which period every effort should be made to establish the tradition of athletics for education. If an institution could not survive such a period of transition, it is a fair question whether the institution has any reason for survival.
Typically American though our frantic devotion to intercollegiate athletics may be, we shall not long tolerate a system which provides only a costly, injurious, and excessive régime of physical training for a few students, especially those who need it least. The call to-day is for inexpensive, healthful, and moderate exercise for all students, especially those who need it most. Colleges must sooner or later heed that call: their athletics must be for education, not for business.
Car-Window Botany
By Lida F. Baldwin
ONE thinks of the botanist as in silence and solitude wandering by some forest brook, or penetrating into almost impenetrable swamps, or climbing rocky mountain paths, lured on by the hope of finding some rare and curious flower. But I in my own experience have had some of my best finds from the windows of a railway train.
It was with people sitting all around me, and the engine puffing noisily away on an up grade, that my delighted eyes first fell on the one-flowered pyrola. The railway cutting had been made in the heart of the deep forest, and as the bank settled down, some of the rarer and shyer forest growths, such as ground-pine, arbutus, and pyrola, in the course of years had slipped over the brink of the cutting and were now part way down the bank. Inside the car were tired and grimy faces; just a few feet outside were forest freshness and greenness, and the white blossoms of the pyrola with their delicate flush.
Sometimes there is no bank on either side of the railway, and from the car window one catches glimpses into the edges of forests, or looks down upon swamps and small clear ponds, or gazes across broad level meadows; but more often one's view from the car window is confined to the narrow ditch of water just beyond the road-bed and to the sides of the cutting just beyond the ditch. Even in that confined outlook there are always possibilities; and it was in just such a ditch of water, as our train slowed up on the outskirts of Buffalo, that I saw growing great numbers of what looked like miniature calla lilies. There were the same golden, erect spadix, and the same ivory-white spathe rolled back in the very curve of the spathe of the calla lily; but the flower was not one quarter the size of the calla. As usual my botany was in my handbag; and the temptation to make a quick dash from the train, to try to secure one specimen for analysis, was almost irresistible. But I did resist the temptation; for the bank was quite steep, and I never could have climbed back in time if the train had started while I was trying to secure my flower; and a lonely woman would have been left in the dusk, watching the train bearing her friends vanish in the deepening twilight. But the small white beauties were never forgotten, and years afterwards I found the flower, arum palustris, growing in a swamp not many miles from my old home.