destroyed by ruder races that were physically superior.

The children that are now in our schools will take to adult
life such foundation as heredity has furnished, with the
equipment that society may care to add. We of this day have no
greater obligation than to prepare these children mentally and
physically for the duties that maturity may bring. Man did not
escape the physical necessities of the body when he became
civilized; the advantages of health are as great to-day as when
our forebears lived in tents. Very few of the primitive man's
activities are left; what he did regularly and from necessity
we do incidentally, and usually for sport, and yet the demands
upon the energies of man have not been lessened, they have only
been changed in form.

Our educational authorities, though in many instances
interested in physical development of the young, have not given
the subject the important place in their program that it
deserves. This is not wholly due to indifference, but largely
to their ideals that were derived from classical-ascetic
standards.

In the medieval ideal the human body was animal and sinful, to
be despised and repressed. The mind was said to be the
spiritual element in man, representing the immortal part of his
nature, and therefore was the only part worthy of attention in
an educational system. From the fall of the Roman empire to the
later nineteenth century this ideal dominated education.

The medieval universities, including Oxford and Cambridge,