college 'amateur athletics'! We especially provide the summer vacation
as a period for play and recreation, and as a time when a majority of
students must earn a part of the expenses of the college year. For these
purposes we suspend all classes. Yet the student who uses this vacation
to play ball and thereby earn some money must either lie about it or be
condemned to outer darkness. There are no intercollegiate athletics for
him; he has become a 'professional.' It matters not how fine his ideals
of sport may be, how strong his character, or how high his scholarship.
These considerations are ignored. The honors all go to the athlete who
neglects his studies in order to make games his supreme interest during
that part of the twelve months which is specifically set apart for
studies.
Far more sensible would be an arrangement whereby, if we must have
intercollegiate athletics at all, the games could be scheduled in
vacation periods, and a part of the gate-receipts, if we must have them
at all, could be used for the necessary living expenses of worthy
students, instead of being squandered, as much of that money is
squandered to-day. That this will seem a preposterous plan to those who
are caught in the maelstrom of the present collegiate system need not
surprise us. An accurate record of the history of intercollegiate
athletics shows that, year in and year out, the arrangements desired by
students are those that interfere most seriously with study during the
days especially intended for study.
The maelstrom of college athletics! That would not seem too strong a
term if we could view the age in which we live in right perspective--an
age so unbalanced nervously that it demands perpetual excitement. We
have fallen into a vicious circle: the excesses of excitement create a
pathological nervous condition which craves greater excesses. The
advertisement of a head-on collision of two locomotives is said to have
drawn the largest crowd in the history of modern 'sport'; next in
attractiveness is an intercollegiate football game. It is unfortunate
that our universities, which should serve as balancing forces,--which
should inculcate the ideal of sport as a counterpoise to an overwrought
civilization,--are actually making conditions worse through cultivating,
by means of athletics as a business, that passion for excitement which
makes sustained thinking impossible and which is elsewhere kept at fever
heat by prize-fights, bullfights, and blood-curdling motion pictures.
V
But even if intercollegiate games are detrimental to the interests of
scholarship, is not the college spirit they create worth all they cost?
Perhaps so. A university is more than a curriculum and a campus. It is
more than the most elaborate student annual can depict. Even in
Carlyle's day, it was more than he called it: a true university was
never a mere 'collection of books.' It is the spirit that giveth life,
and 'college spirit' is certainly a name to conjure with. The first
question is what we mean by college spirit. A student may throw his hat
in the air, grab a megaphone, give 'three long rahs,' go through the
gymnastics of a cheer-leader,--putting the most ingenious mechanical
toys to shame,--and yet leave some doubt whether he has adequately
defined college spirit.
What is this college spirit that hovers over the paid coach and his
grandstand--this 'indefinable something,' as one writer calls it, 'which
is fanned into a bright flame by intercollegiate athletics'? Shall we
judge the spirit by its manifestations in an institution famed above all
else for its winning teams and its college spirit? In such an
institution, not long ago, every student was cudgeled or cajoled into
'supporting the team,' and many a callow youth acted as though he
thought he had reached the heights of self-sacrifice when he sat for
hours on the grandstand, watching practice, puffing innumerable
cigarettes, and laying up a stock of canned enthusiasm for the big game.
A student who would not support his team by betting on it was regarded
as deficient in spirit. Every intercollegiate game was the occasion of
general neglect of college courses. If the game was at a neighboring
city, the class-rooms were half empty for two days; but the bar-rooms of
that city were not empty, and worse places regularly doubled their rates
on the night of a big game. Some of the most enthusiastic supporters of
the team went to jail for disturbing the peace. If the contest took
place at home, returning alumni filled the fraternity houses and
celebrated with general drunkenness. 'An indefinable something'--consisting
of college property and that of private citizens--was 'fanned into a
bright flame' in celebration of the victory. Following this came the
spectacle of young men parading the streets in nightshirts. For
residents of the town who did not enjoy this particular kind of spirit,
the night was made hideous by the noises of revelry. All this and much
more was tolerated for years on the assumption that students, imbued
with college spirit, should not be subjected to the laws of decent
living that govern those members of civilized communities who have not
had the advantages of a higher education. The most serious difficulties
between faculties and students and between students and the police, the
country over, for the past twenty years, have arisen in connection with
displays of 'college spirit' after the 'big game.' Any college and any
community might cheerfully sacrifice this kind of college spirit.
But some men mean by college spirit something finer than lawlessness,
dissipation, and rowdyism. They mean the loyalty to an institution which
makes a student guard its good name by being manly and courteous in
conduct at all times and in all places. They mean the sense of
responsibility which aids a student in forming habits of temperance and
industry. They mean that eagerness to make a grateful use of his
opportunities which leads a student to keep his own body fit, through
moderate athletics, and a physical training that knows no season--is
never broken. By college spirit some men mean this and far more: they
mean that loyalty to a college which rivets a man to the severest tasks
of scholarship, through which he gains intellectual power and
enthusiasm, without which no graduate is an entire credit to any
college; and finally they mean that vision of an ideal life beyond
Commencement which shows a man that only through the rigid
subordination of transient and trivial pleasures can he hope to become
the only great victory a university ever wins--a trained, devoted, and
inspired alumnus, working for the welfare of mankind. There is no
evidence that the intercollegiate athletics of to-day inculcate in many
men this kind of college spirit.
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 regime 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.
[Illustration]
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.
One July day I traveled from Quebec to Portland on the slowest of
trains. The road ran for much of the way, first on one side, then on
the other, of the Chaudiere River, but never far out of sight of its
clear brown waters. Fortunately for me, our locomotive used wood for
fuel, and consequently every few hours we would stop at some great
woodpile in a forest clearing while the trainmen threw a fresh supply of
wood into the tender; and some of the passengers took advantage of the
stop to make short explorations into the forest. About mid-day, as we
were riding slowly along, I began to notice a pink-purple flower that
was new to me, growing here and there in rather marshy places. Shortly
after I had first seen the flower the added slowness of the train showed
that we were coming to another woodpile. The instant the train stopped I
was out of the cars, over the low rail fence, and picking my way
carefully from grassy hummock to grassy hummock; and soon I had found a
specimen. Upon analysis it proved to be calopogon, familiar to all New
Englanders from childhood, but new to my Ohio eyes.
I have never made any formal herbarium, and the only botanical record I
have ever kept consists of the date and place of my first seeing the
flower written opposite its scientific name in the margin of the pages
of my old school-girl's copy of Gray's Botany. But that is the only
record one needs to whom all the flowers one knows are either old
friends or new acquaintances--in either case distinct individuals.
Often, as I have been turning the pages of the old botany in a bit of
analyzing, I have stopped at the page on which is written, opposite the
scientific name of the calopogon, 'Saint Henry's, Canada, July 11,
1884'; and across the more than twenty years that lie between, I smell
once more the balsam of the Canadian forest, and see the amber-brown
waters of the Chaudiere River, and hear the shouts of the trainmen as
they throw the great sticks of wood up to the tender; and giving color
to all this mental picture is the pink-purple blossom of the calopogon.
But all trains do not have the accommodating habit of stopping for wood
just after you have seen a strange flower; in that case, all that you
can do is, take the best mental landmarks you can, and then at the first
opportunity go back for your specimen. One summer I was going down on
the express from Philadelphia to Cape May. As you near the coast the
road runs through very level country, and between the railway and the
pine wood lies a strip of marshy ground about forty feet wide. Each
year, as I go back to the sea-coast, I watch eagerly for my first sight
of the two characteristic flowers of the Jersey coast, the swamp mallow
and the sabbatia. On this particular morning I had already seen many of
the great mallows with their rose-pink flowers, so like those of the
hollyhock that not even the most careless eye can fail to notice the
family resemblance; and I had welcomed them as a sure sign of the
fast-nearing seashore.
Now, with my face, as usual, close to the window, I was watching the
sparse marsh-grass most narrowly to see if I could detect amidst it the
pink star-shaped flower of the sabbatia. Suddenly the marsh-grass was
set thick with spikes of yellow flowers, just rising above the level of
the grass. There was only that one hurried look as the train went by;
but from that look I felt almost certain of two things: the first was
that I had never seen that flower before, and the second, that it must
be close of kin to an old flower friend of mine, the white
fringed-orchis.
Then and there I determined to get that flower, and the first thing was
to make sure of its location. At first this seemed almost hopeless,
since for miles back we had had that narrow strip of marsh-grass flanked
by the unchanging pine woods; but in a few minutes our road passed under
another railway; here was one landmark, and in a couple of minutes more
we went past a way-station slowly enough for me to read the name on the
board; now I knew that I could find my plant. The next day we took one
of the local trains from Cape May, got off at the station whose name I
had read, and started down the track. After a walk of a mile we passed
under that other railroad; and about two miles farther down the track I
saw again the yellow spikes of the flowers barely o'er-topping the
grass.
It had been a hot July morning with a sultry land breeze blowing, and as
we walked the three miles down the unshaded track, we had weariedly and
unavailingly slapped at mosquitoes at every step. All of these
discomforts together had not daunted my courage; but the swarms of
mosquitoes that arose buzzing at my first step into the marsh-grass made
me draw back to the comparative security of the railway track, with the
feeling that no flower could repay one for facing those swarms. A second
look at the yellow flowers growing not thirty feet away gave me fresh
courage and I started again. I was as quick as possible; but when I was
back once more on the track, this time with my hands full of the
flowers, face and hands and arms were one mass of blotches from the
mosquito bites.
Upon analysis the flower proved to be the yellow fringed-orchis, the
handsomest species of its genus, and the one most closely allied to the
white fringed-orchis. Our train had been running about forty miles an
hour; I had never even known that there was a yellow orchid, but in that
one quick glance from the express train the unmistakable family look of
the orchis had shown.
Success and pleasure in car-window botany depend not so much on a
scientific knowledge of structural details as on the ability of the eye
to recognize at a glance the characteristic effect produced by a mass of
details. It is this ability which enables you to be sure that you
recognize the faces of old flower friends in the hurried glance cast
from the window; which enables you to tell with certainty gray-blue
clump of houstonias from gray-blue clump of hepaticas, wind-swept bank
of purplish phlox from wind-swept bank of wild geranium; and it is that
same ability to recognize the characteristic effect produced by a group
of structural details which enables one to place without analysis the
new flower in the right family.
I have always been secretly very proud of the certainty with which at
the first sight of the yellow flower I felt that it was an orchis, but
all my feeling in connection with it is not that of pleasure. Certain
flowers always recall to me certain sounds; in most cases the sound
associated with a flower is the one heard at the time at which I first
saw the flower; and to this day, with the thought of the yellow
fringed-orchis is inseparably joined that most persistent and irritating
of sounds, the buzzing of the mosquito.
But the true history of a car-window botanist is not always a record of
successful achievement, of the triumphant finding of his flower; he also
has his haunting disappointments, his glimpses of strange flowers which
he is never afterwards able to place. One July day, riding through
northern New Hampshire, I saw just over the fence at the edge of the
woods a tall plant--evidently some kind of a lily. It bore a single dark
orange-red flower, which did not droop as do the flowers of the meadow
lily, but stood stiffly erect. I have never seen that lily since; though
never does a July come, especially if it is to be spent in a new place,
that I do not think, 'Maybe this year I shall find my lily.' Perhaps,
after all, such experiences are not to be classed with the
disappointments either of life or of car-window botany--is it not rather
true that to both they give zest and expectancy?
The charm of such botanizing is not alone in finding or in hoping to
find some new flower: even more enduring is the pleasure that comes from
the recognition of the faces of old friends in new surroundings. An
April day's journey was made one long pleasure; for the swamplike ditch
just below the road-bed shone golden with the intense yellow of the
marsh-marigold, an old friend from my earliest childhood; and when the
railway ran half-way up a hillside, I spied, amid the dead leaves of
last year, the little clumps of the clustering blue hepaticas, and
recognized even in those fleeting glances the singularly starry effect
produced by the numerous white stamens; and as the train crossed over
the creeks, that flow over rocky bottoms from out the hemlock woods, I
saw in the opening up of the creek bed the June-berry trees in showers
of white bloom, looking doubly white against the dark green of the
hemlocks, just as I had seen them the day before in the hemlock woods of
Mill Creek at my own home.
One of the keenest pleasures of the railway botanist comes from his
enjoyment of the massed color of great quantities of flowers of the same
kind. One morning our train was running along through the level Jersey
country; it was at that wretched hour of the morning when you have just
taken your place in someone else's seat while the porter is getting your
own ready, and you have that all-over miserable feeling that comes from
a night's ride in a stuffy sleeper. In an instant all discomfort was
forgotten in the sight of a wide salt meadow which seemed one mass of
the pink swamp-mallows. The gray morning mist was turned silvery white
by the rising sun, and giving color to it all were the wide stretches of
the flowers. It was all one shimmering mass of misty silvery-gray,
sunlight radiance, and rose-color as delicate as that of the lining of
some seashells.
Once again, this time on one of our home roads near Pittsburg, I felt
the beauty of the color of great masses of flowers. The railway runs
along about half-way up the bluffs by the side of the Beaver River; as
we rounded a curve, the steep bank above me turned suddenly intensely
red with the vivid color of the scarlet campion. Only those who notice
most closely have any idea how rare a color in our wild flowers any
shade of true red is. Nearly all the flowers that are commonly spoken of
as red are in reality purplish pink or reddish lilac. Indeed I know only
two wild flowers whose color is a true red. One of these is the cardinal
lobelia, whose petals are of the darkest, clearest, most velvety red;
and the other flower is the scarlet campion. The color of this latter is
true scarlet, and the river bluff that June morning fairly glowed with
its bloom. It is Holmes who compares the color of the cardinal flower
to that of drops of blood new fallen from a wounded eagle's breast; but
any true comparison for the color of this other flower must be founded
on life, and on life when it is at its fullest of strength and of
enjoyment.
Even the most ardent of car-window botanists will not claim that the
only place from which the beauty of the color of flowers in mass can be
appreciated is the window of a railway train. To all there come memories
of fitful spring days when in long country drives they have seen partly
worn-out meadows and barren hillsides turned to the softest blue-gray
mist by the delicate color of countless blossoms of houstonia. And as
they drove slowly along the partly dried, muddy roads of mid-April the
effect of every varying phase of the spring weather on the massed color
sank slowly into their consciousness. They had time to notice how blue
was the color-mist lying on the sheltered meadows in the sunshine, and
how coldly gray it grew as it crept up the hillsides across which the
chill spring wind was blowing.
And if one lives in a country where there are chestnut ridges, one looks
forward through all the spring to that one week of late June and
earliest July when the chestnut trees will be in bloom. The long
staminate flowers of the chestnut are a soft cream-yellow with a
greenish tint; and on the ridges where the trees grow in abundance the
great irregular masses of their blossoming tops do not stand out
against their background of the dark green foliage of midsummer, but
blend softly with it, giving to all such an indescribable effect of
lightness and airiness that the whole wooded ridge seems not to be
fastened securely to the earth, but to be floating cloud-like above it.
During that one week of the chestnut-blossoming one stops at door or at
window in the midst of the early morning work to watch for the moment
when the first rays of the rising sun, falling on the cream-yellow of
the chestnut tops, turn them into their own deep gold; and at the
restful close of day one lingers on the doorstep through the long June
twilight till their blossoming tops can no longer be distinguished from
the dark foliage of the other trees in the gathering darkness.