Excerpt from The Sports and Pastimes of American Boys: A Guide and d104-Book of Games of the Play-Ground, the Parlor, and the Field, Adapted Especially for American Youth

OW that the spirit of the age favors the plan of a judicious combination of physical recreation with mental culture, it is timely to prepare a text-book of sports and pastimes for boys, which will best tend to promote this system of paying due attention to physical as well as mental education. An old writer says, Let me make the songs of a people, and I care not who makes their laws. This rule is as applicable to the structure of the sports of a people as it is to the com position of their songs. The pastimes of boys of all nations partake largely of the peculiar character of the people whose youth engage in them. The boys of a war like nation find their chief recreation in sports in which feats of brutal courage, and of endurance of fatigue and pain, are marked characteristics. On the other hand, the youths of a peaceful people enjoy those pastimes best which most com pare in their character with the national life of their progenitors. Differences in climate necessarily have their relation to the character of national sports but it is more in the essential character of the people themselves that their national pastimes differ, and this is especially noticeable in the receative sports of boys. It is in this respect that the games of American boyhood are different, as a rule, from those of English youths. Of course, there is a certain degree of similarity in most of them, arising from their English origin but there is scarcely an imported game that is at all open to improvement, which has not of late years been essentially Americanized witness the evolution of our manly national game of base-ball from the old English schoolboy game of Rounders.

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