Excerpt from The Sports and Pastimes of American Boys: A Guide and Text-Book of Games of the Play-Ground, the Parlor, and the Field, Adapted Especially for American Youth

The experience of the last half century of our American progress in refined civilization has conclusively shown that physical culture must keep pace with mental education, if the latter is to be carried to the point of perfection. There are, of course, extremes in this respect as in everything else, and just as we Americans, up to within the past twenty-five years, cultivated our minds at the expense of our bodies, just so are our English cousins of the present day giving too much of their attention to physical culture, to the neglect of that of the mind. To read such influential sporting journals as The Field, Land and Water and weekly papers of that class in England now not to mention Belts Life and kindred journals one might very reasonably think that the English leisure classes had little else to do or to think of than sports and pastimes. But this is as much the extreme in one way as it has been, since the early days of the Republic, with us the other way. The happy medium, however, unquestionably recognizes out-door recreation as going hand in hand with mental culture. Morally, too, the aspect of the case is one which gives encouragement to national pastimes as essential to the right and proper growth of our young people. The inhabitants of our large American cities have, up to within a late period, lacked a healthy physique. Their mental powers have drawn too heavily on the nervous forces of their bodies and the result has been that the middle period of life has seen thousands carried to the grave, who, with proper attention to physical exercise and recreation in youth and early manhood, would have reached a good old age, ere the sere and yellow leaf of time had made itself apparent. But it is useless further to sermonize on the subject. Experience has taught us as a people that our old-time system of all work and no play, of overtaxing the mind at the expense of a neglected physique, is a very bad policy, and very wisely and characteristically we are gaining yearly in wisdom in this respect, and hence the increased and growing popularity of out-door sports for our boys and young men, and for physical exercise for the fair sex as well, in the large cities and towns of the American Continent.

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