boat-racing. About two hundred thousand
young ladies could not sleep nights, so anxious were they to know whether
Yale or Williams would be the winner. The newspapers gave three and four
columns to the particulars, the telegraph wires thrilled the victory to all
parts of the land. Some of the religions papers condemned the whole affair,
enlarging upon the strained wrists, broken blood-vessels and barbaric
animalism of men who ought to have been rowing their race with the Binomial
Theorem for one oar and Kames' Elements of Criticism for the other.

For the most part, we sympathized with the boys, and confess that at our
hotel we kept careful watch of the bulletin to see whose boat came in
ahead. We are disposed to applaud anything that will give our young men
muscular development. Students have such a tendency to lounge, and mope,
and chew, and eat almond-nuts at midnight, and read novels after they go to
bed, the candlestick set up on Webster's dictionary or the Bible, that we
prize anything that makes them cautious about their health, as they must be
if they would enter the list of contestants. How many of our country boys
enter the freshman class of college in robust health, which lasts them
about a twelvemonth; then in the sophomore they lose their liver; in the
junior they lose their stomach; in the senior they lose their back bone;
graduating skeletons, more fit for an anatomical museum than the bar or
pulpit.

"Midnight oil," so much eulogized, is the poorest kind of kerosene. Where
hard study kills one student, bad habits kill a hundred. Kirk White, while
at Cambridge, wrote beautiful hymns; but if he had gone to bed at ten
o'clock that night instead of three o'clock the next morning, he would have
been of more service to the world and a healthier example to all
collegians. Much of the learning of the day is morbid, and much of the
religion bilious. We want, first of all, a clean heart, and next a strong
stomach. Falling from grace is often chargeable to derangement of gastric
juices. Oar and bat may become salutary weapons.

But, after all, there was something wrong about those summer boat-races. A
student with a stout arm, and great girth, and full chest, and nothing
else, is not at all admirable. Mind and body need to be driven tandem, the
body for the wheel horse and the intellect the leader. We want what is now
proposed in some directions--a grand collegiate literary race. Let the
mental contest be on the s