It is one good evidence of the increasing interest in these exercises, that the American gymnasiums built during the past year or two have far surpassed all their predecessors in size and completeness, and have probably no superiors in the world.  The Seventh Regiment Gymnasium in New York, just opened by Mr. Abner S. Brady, is one hundred and eighty feet by fifty-two, in its main hall, and thirty-five feet in height, with nearly a thousand pupils.  The beautiful hall of the Metropolitan Gymnasium, in Chicago, measures one hundred and eight feet by eighty, and is twenty feet high at the sides, with a dome in the centre, forty feet high, and the same in diameter.  Next to these probably rank the new gymnasium at Cincinnati, the Tremont Gymnasium at Boston, and the Bunker-Hill Gymnasium at Charlestown, all recently opened.  Of college institutions the most complete are probably those at Cambridge and New Haven,—­the former being eighty-five feet by fifty, and the latter one hundred feet by fifty, in external dimensions.  The arrangements for instruction are rather more systematic at Harvard, but Yale has several valuable articles of apparatus—­as the rack-bars and the series of rings—­which have hardly made their appearance, as yet, in Massachusetts, though considered indispensable in New York.

Gymnastic exercises are as yet but very sparingly introduced into our seminaries, primary or professional, though a great change is already beginning.  Frederick the Great complained of the whole Prussian school-system of his day, because it assumed that men were originally created for students and clerks, whereas his Majesty argued that the very shape of the human body rather proved them to be meant by Nature for postilions.  Until lately all our educational plans have assumed man to be a merely sedentary being; we have employed teachers of music and drawing to go from school to school to teach those elegant arts, but have had none to teach the art of health.  Accordingly, the pupils have exhibited more complex curves in their spines than they could possibly portray on the blackboard, and acquired such discords in their nervous systems as would have utterly disgraced their singing.  It is something to have got beyond the period when active sports were actually prohibited.  I remember when there was but one boat owned by a Cambridge student,—­the owner was the first of his class, by the way, to get his name into capitals in the “Triennial Catalogue” afterwards,—­and that boat was soon reported to have been suppressed by the Faculty, on the plea that there was a college law against a student’s keeping domestic animals, and a boat was a domestic animal within the meaning of the statute.  Manual labor was thought less reprehensible; but schools on this basis have never yet proved satisfactory, because either the hands or the brains have always come off second-best from the effort to combine:  it is a law of Nature, that after a hard day’s work one does not need more work, but play.  But in