Twenty years after the octagonal gymnasium on Cambridge Street and Broadway was opened to students in Harvard University a structure ten times as costly, the gift of Augustus Hemenway, Harvard 1875, to his _alma mater_, was nearing completion at the corner of Cambridge Street and Holmes Place, facing the College Yard. The selection and arrangement of apparatus and the details of system and method were left to the newly appointed director, Dr. Dudley Allen Sargent, a man whose stimulating and molding influence upon physical training in American colleges in the next few decades was to be more potent and more widely felt than any other that can be named. His interest in gymnastics reached back to boyhood days, and during ten years of experience as a teacher in that field he had evolved certain unique plans of equipment and administration which were now to be carried out under most favorable conditions. He was descended from New England ancestry, the son of a ship carpenter and sparmaker in Belfast, Maine, on the west side of Penobscot Bay, and was born there on September 28, 1849. The harbor and the bay furnished abundant opportunity for youthful activity and enterprise, and the early death of his father made it necessary to give much of the time outside of school hours and in the long vacations to varied forms of manual labor on land and sea, under the direction of an uncle. Meanwhile he had joined with other high school boys in putting up a horizontal bar and some other apparatus on the school grounds and starting a gymnastic club. Reports of exhibitions given at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, sixty miles away to the southwest, added to their zeal, and constant practice brought such a degree of skill that they ventured to give similar public exhibitions of their own, first in the town-hall at home, and later in some of the neighboring towns. An invitation to become director of the gymnasium at Bowdoin College, in the fall of 1869, opened the way to further study for the young expert and started him on a career which was followed thenceforth without interruption. Two years later he was ready to enter the college as a freshman, retaining still the position to which he had been originally appointed, and now the authorities required all students to attend regular class exercises in the gymnasium for a half-hour daily during most of the fall and winter terms, _i.e._, when they were not occupied with military drill. During his sophomore year Sargent spent three months at Yale College, introducing there the same plan of work, and he continued to divide his time between the two institutions until his graduation from Bowdoin (A.B.) in 1875. The fall of that year found him instructor in gymnastics in Yale College and a student in the Yale Medical School, and from the latter he obtained the degree of M.D. in January of 1878.