Outdoor sports, under proper restrictions, promote health and foster mental qualities. Foot-ball and base-ball have gained an undue prominence in some colleges. It is questionable whether they are the most desirable forms of exercise for physical development, since only a very small portion of the students at any one time can engage in them. The evil features of inter-collegiate games, especially as practiced, offset their advantages. The undue excitement and spirit of rivalry fostered is foreign to the true idea of an earnest student life. The college is no monastery to make the student a recluse, but it should be a place of solitude, a modern cloister, where the student may be kept in partial isolation and away from the turbulent stream of public life and distracting social influences. The student may keep in the midst of the current of actual modern thought and life without sacrificing the quiet seclusion which is an essential requirement for the best scholarship. These inter-collegiate games have been attended with temptations perilous to character. Abundant testimony is not wanting to show that their tendency has been toward rowdyism, gambling, debauchery, and other disgraceful conduct. Some of the games scarcely rise above the brutality of the prize fight. They have no elevating tendency, and no apology can be made for their roughness and bad moral effects. The fine natural instincts of the majority of American people are repelled at such physical prowess. It is not necessary to introduce the element of pugilism in order to give vent to the superabundance of youthful animal spirits. The abuse of these outdoor sports should not make us blind to the fact that they have a legitimate use. It is wiser to control and direct them than to curb the exuberance of good feeling which they call forth, and which might find expression in less appropriate channels. It should be borne in mind that all physical training is a failure unless the aim is to maintain and develop health, to make the student symmetrical, strong, graceful and better fitted for the duties of living. A symmetrical development involves, likewise, _the cultivation of the moral and spiritual nature_.