If this attempt to set forth clearly the characteristics of the different stages and phases through which physical education has passed, to introduce the persons who have contributed to its advancement, and to guide the reader to the best that has been written on the subject, shall lead to deeper and more general appreciation of the place which physical education should win and hold in general education, and to the adoption of wiser measures where it is introduced, the labor expended upon the volume will be well rewarded. Much has been omitted which might have been included. If inaccuracies are discovered the author will be glad to have his attention called to them. F. E. L. OBERLIN, OHIO, 1923. EDITOR’S PREFACE. The shore of physical education is strewn with the wrecks of systems and movements, many of them good in themselves, but left to drift when the personal support and enthusiasm of the founder was removed from the helm. It has only been when some great national crisis had to be faced and the minds of patriots and scholars were engaged in the effort to meet it, that systems have been evolved great enough to survive the death of their founder, the test of time and change in their national conditions. This is notably true of the gymnastics of Denmark, Sweden and Germany. Incomplete as systems of physical education without the addition of games, but logical and accurate in their application to the conditions they have had to meet, whenever similar conditions have arisen it is to them we have turned for inspiration and instruction, and nowhere was this better shown than in the great war of 1914, where crude masses of untrained and underdeveloped men had to be made quick and accurate in response to command and given that control of their bodies that is the true function of physical education in its highest sense. To the sincere student of physical education nothing has a more sobering effect than the study of those advances made by the great men who have given their lives to their cause. He finds that most of the theories that come to him as new and startling have been thought before and have been either rejected or put into practice as well or better than he is likely to do, and so if he is a philosopher, he can avoid the inevitable failure of schemes that have been discarded and adapt from material of proved worth the material that suits his special conditions.