The Olympic Games were concluded with the distribu- tion of
prizes on Wednesday. The Marathon Race, the great event of the meeting, was • contested on Tuesday afternoon, and was won by a young Canadian of Anglo- Irish parentage named Sherring, who completed the dis- tance—about twenty-five and a half miles—in two hours fifty-one minutes, the shortest time recorded since the revival of the games. The list of winners shows that the Americans, who excelled in speed, have won in all seventy-five prizes, the British thirty-nine, and the Swedes and Greeks each twenty-eight. In gymnastics the Scandinavians seem to have established an easy pre-eminence. The world-wide interest shown in the games, and the number of competitors who have come from great distances to take part in them, mean, as we have contended elsewhere, a good deal more than the mere cult of athletics. It is a striking, if not always conscious, evidence of the debt that the world owes to the Greek spirit, in which physical went hand in hand with mental culture.
