The third instalment of “Reminiscences of Harvard, 1822-26,” by Rev. Cazneau Palfrey, printed in _The Harvard Register_ of October, 1880, contains this passage: “The first movement in the direction of gymnastics made in college was made in my senior year.... The medical professors of the College published an appeal to the students, strongly recommending to them the practice of gymnastic exercises; and a meeting of all the classes was held in the College chapel (such a meeting as I do not remember hearing of on any other occasion), at which a response was made to this appeal, and resolutions passed expressing our readiness to follow the suggestions made in it. One of the unoccupied commons halls (on the first floor of University Hall) was fitted up with various gymnastic appliances; and other fixtures were erected on the Delta, the enclosure now occupied by Memorial Hall. But Dr. Follen did not confine his operations to these two localities. One day he was to be seen issuing from the College yard at a dogtrot, with all college (the total number of undergraduates at that period was not more than two hundred) at his heels in single file, and arms akimbo, making a train a mile long, bound for the top of Prospect Hill. Great was the amazement and amusement of all passersby. I was one of the bobs of that living kite; but, as I dropped prematurely, I cannot speak confidently of the end....” Anyone familiar with the appearance of a German _Turnplatz_ of the Jahn type will readily understand the allusions made by Thomas Wentworth Higginson in his chapter on “The Gymnasium, and Gymnastics in Harvard College,” in the second volume of “The Harvard Book” (Cambridge, 1875). “One of my most impressive early reminiscences,” he says, “is of a certain moment when I looked out timidly from my father’s gateway, on what is now Kirkland Street, in Cambridge, and saw the forms of young men climbing, swinging, and twirling aloft in the open playground opposite. It was the triangular field then called the ‘Delta,’ where the great Memorial Hall now stands. The apparatus on which these youths were exercising was, to my childish eyes, as inexplicable as if it had been a pillory or a gallows, which indeed it somewhat resembled. It consisted of high uprights and crossbars, with ladders and swinging ropes, and complications of wood and cordage, whose details are vanished from my memory. Beneath some parts of the apparatus there were pits sunk in the earth, and so well constructed that they remained long after the woodwork had been removed. This early recollection must date as far back as 1830.”