COLLEGE SPORTS.

The Rev. Dr. Howard Crosby, in an address on "The Errors of our Collegiate Institutions," before the Phi Beta Kappa alumni, in New York, Thursday evening, said in concluding his remarks: "The only other mistake common to our colleges to which I will now refer, is the fostering of boat clubs and ball clubs. That young men should in time of relaxation go out on the green and have a good game of ball, or should go down to the river and have a row, is most natural and commendable, but that they should form clubs for training, and spend months in the process, and have grand public contests before thousands all over the country, and attract the professional roughs with their betting and drinking to the grand show, in all of which study is neglected, and must be neglected, is an abomination of the first order. It is a shame that college presidents are actually promoting this demoralizing system. It would seem as if these worthies thought that colleges were instituted to collect a crowd of young bloods together that they might have a high time. No wonder so many young men cannot go to college because all this high living is so costly. If they refuse to pay the taxes for all sorts of fooling they are shoved aside as mean fellows, and this ostracism very few can bear. It costs a student at Yale or Harvard from $1200 to $2000 a year if he is going to be in full rapport with his class. It becomes college trustees to see that these expensive habits, so inimical to all true study, are prohibited, and that professors and students give heed to the important work for which the college was created. I believe all of these errors in our college management arise from a servile aping of foreign colleges and universities, in which imitation we go (as all imitations are apt to do) far beyond our patterns, and utterly forget that our colleges are neither gymnasiums on the one hand nor universities on the other, but schools sui jeneris, to be adapted to the peculiar conditions of our country and the state of society here."