[220] In the pines back of the present site of Sargent Gymnasium. A report of the Visiting Committee to the Board of Trustees and Overseers of Bowdoin College, dated September 2, 1828, contains the following: “The committee would introduce to the favorable notice of the Trustees and Overseers the Gymnasium which has been recently established. We have had some opportunity of witnessing its exercises and are convinced that its effects are highly salutary.... These exercises are voluntary, few however decline them. Those who have associated as Gymnics have presented a request that a shed may be erected for their accommodation. But highly as we approve of the association we think that this request cannot now be acceded to. Other and more pressing wants of the college demand all its funds.” This outdoor gymnasium was in existence until the early sixties, when the college fitted up for similar uses a building formerly occupied as a college common. [221] For references to private gymnasia opened in New York and Philadelphia at this period see _Mind and Body_, =12=, 350 and 351 (February, 1906). CHAPTER XXII. THE “NEW GYMNASTICS” OF DIO LEWIS. In the third and fourth decades of the nineteenth century four different systems of physical training had been brought forward for trial in the United States—the drill and discipline of the military academy, the Jahn gymnastics, manual labor on the farm or in the shop, and “calisthenics” for girls and women. The claims of each were pressed by enthusiastic advocates, and there was no lack of imitators of the educational institutions in which each had first become incorporated; but for various reasons not one of the four was generally adopted or won for itself more than temporary foothold. From 1835 until 1860, though educators were increasingly alive to the importance of physical training,[222] no one appeared with anything that seemed more likely to meet the conditions and needs of the time. Then came Dio Lewis, with his “new gymnastics for men, women, and children,” something definite and practical. His contagious enthusiasm created a wave of popular interest that spread to all parts of the country, and the “Normal Institute of Physical Education” which he opened in Boston in the summer of 1861 was the first attempt in America to prepare teachers of a subject whose right to a place in the school curriculum had long been conceded. [Illustration: FIG. 70.—Dio Lewis (1823-1886).] Dioclesian, or, as he called himself in after life, Dio Lewis, came of vigorous Welsh stock and was born March 3, 1823, on a farm in Cayuga County, New York, within a few miles of Auburn. Loran L. Lewis, born two years later, who served two terms in the Senate of his native state, and from 1882 until 1896 was Justice of the New York Supreme Court, has written as follows regarding the early life of his elder brother: