About 1860 Maclaren was asked to work out a system of physical education for the British army. The result was “A Military System of Gymnastic Exercises for the Use of Instructors” (London, H. M. Stationery Office, 1862), “approved by the General Commanding in Chief and to be adopted at all stations where the means of carrying it out may be provided,” according to a general order issued in February, 1862. Already, in 1861, a gymnasium built on the plan of the Oxford one had been erected at Aldershot, and Maclaren himself has described[163] the next step in carrying out the plan of the military authorities. “Two detachments of non-commissioned officers, under the command of the officer (Major Hammersley) selected by the authorities to direct its introduction (_i.e._, the Maclaren system) and conduct its future extension—an officer specially selected for his high qualifications for the difficult work of introducing into the Army a new and hitherto entirely untried institution—were sent to Oxford to be qualified as instructors, and thence removed to Aldershot to form a normal school for the preparation of other teachers, and form the center of the military gymnastic system. “The first detachment of non-commissioned officers, twelve in number, sent to me to qualify as Instructors for the Army were selected from all branches of the service. They ranged between nineteen and twenty-nine years of age, between five feet five inches and six feet in height, between nine stone two pounds and twelve stone six pounds in weight, and had seen from two to twelve years’ service. I confess I felt greatly discomfited at the appearance of this detachment, so different in every physical attribute; I perceived the difficulty, the very great difficulty, of working them in the same squad at the same exercises; and the unfitness of some of them for a duty so special as the instruction of beginners in a new system of bodily exercise.... But I also saw that the detachment presented perhaps as fair a sample of the army as it was possible to obtain in the same number of men, and that if I closely observed the results of the system upon these men, the weak and the strong, the short and the tall, the robust and the delicate, I should be furnished with a fair idea of what would be the results of the system upon the Army at large. I therefore received the detachment just as it stood, and following my method of periodic measurements, I carefully ascertained and registered the developments of each at the commencement of his course of instruction, and at certain intervals throughout its progress.”[164]