THE RELATION Or ATHLETICS TO THE COLLEGE 167 second to none in the land and accommodations for at least a thousand students. We endeavor to give a; stranger an idea of the magnitude of the place and invariably his first utterance is; "How many students are there ?" When such a question is answered further words in praise of the College are wasted, for the interrogator at once measures it by its student roll and looks upon our further information as the imaginings of an enthusi astic dreamer. Sometimes, however, such skeptics can be per suaded to visit the College. When they do so and see the truth fulness of the representations that are made of it the wonderment at the small student roll is impressed all the more on their minds. What is needed is students. Students more than anything else. If there were eight hundred students at State to-day the matter of procuring appropriations enough to complete the great work of up-building that has already begun would be of cotnpar-, atively insignificant import. Legislators would favor the College who really know nothing of it now, because they measure its needs and its good by the number of students it has. There are many ways to be suggested by which the student roll might be built up, but the one that impresses itself most forcibly on our mind is through the advertising that is secured through the medium of athletics. It is not our purpose to discuss the various views held by persons who think athletics carried to ex tremes in our colleges of to-day, suffice it to say that the athlete is not leading his class in the inverse order and when he is grad uated it is with enough physical development to play a good second to the mental training he has secured. Athletic advertising is the best that can be had now. There never was a time when the minds of men and boys ran more to superiority in college sports than they do to-day. The two games of foot ball that were played last month by our team, the one at the University of Pennsylvania, the other at Princeton, did more to advertise The Pennsylvania State College than anything that has been clone in that line for a year. Get our foot ball team into the Big Four class, put a base ball team on the diamond that will bring such newspaper headings as "State Wins a Great Victory," and send a creditable track team to all the important meets and students will literally foll6w them to the institution. It is all right to talk about high standing, hard working insti-
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers