Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Johann Christoph Friedrich GuTsMurns chapter{Section 4JOHANN CHRISTOPH FRIEDRICH GUTSMUTHS The first school in modern times to give physical training a place in its daily program seems to have been that opened by the educational reformer Johann Bernhard Basedow (1723-1790) in 1774 at Dessau, in the German Duchy of Anhalt. He assigned to one of the teachers, Johann Friedrich Simon, succeeded in 1778 by Johann Jakob Du Toit, as a part of his regular duties the direction and supervision of the exercises of pupils. Christian Gotthilf Salzmann (1744- 1811), after three years of teaching at the Dessau school, withdrew to open (1784) a similar "Educational Institute " on the country estate of Schnepfen- thal, on the north slope of the Thuringian Forest about ten miles southwest of Gotha. The direction of the daily gymnastic lesson and the Sunday games of pupils, entrusted in 1785 to Christian Carl Andre, was turned over a year later to Johann Christoph Friedrich GtnrsMuTHS (1759-1839), who thus became, not the first, but the fourth teacher of gymnastics in modern times in a school open to all classes of society. The pre-eminence of GutsMuths among pioneers of modern physical training does not rest, therefore, upon priority in time, but is due rather to his long period of service — almost fifty years,— to the character and results of his teaching and the favorable impression which it made upon visitors, and to the series of volumes from his pen which formed what has been aptly called the first normal school of physical training for other teachers, and not in Germany alone, but elsewhere in Europe and even beyond its borders. Consult the American Physical Education Review for March, 1899 (Vol. IV., pp. 1-18) and June, 1904 (Vol. IX., pp. 89-96 and 104-107); and Mind and Bo...