594 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



upon the horse is shown in the instinct of the child of to-day to play 

 horse, to ride a rocking-horse or a stick or anything. The child's first 

 musical instruments, the rattle, the drum and the horn, were the first 

 musical instruments of primitive man. These illustrations could be 

 multiplied indefinitely. They show the limitations of the Groos theory 

 of play, for none of the plays of this class have much to do in preparing 

 the child for the life of to-day, or in giving him special practise for his 

 future work. We ourselves are so much slaves of the past in our habits 

 of thought that we do not easily realize how far from the actual life of 

 the present day is this play-life of the child. The real world of to-day is 

 that of the laboratory, the school, the library, the bank, the office, the 

 shop, the street, the factory, the farm and the railroad. Notwithstand- 

 ing the child's strong imitative bent, his world, as shown in his tales, his 

 dreams and the plays he loves best, is that of the forest, the stream, the 

 camp, the cave, the. hunting-ground and the battlefield. 



Everything which has such a vital and absorbing interest for the boy 

 has had at one time in our racial history an actual life and death inter- 

 est for mankind. Take, for instance, the jackknife. How many knives 

 has your boy had and lost and what rich joy there is in every new one ! 

 We see how the practise and preparation theory of play fails here. The 

 knife has no significance in society now. It has degenerated to mere 

 finger-nail purposes. But at one time it meant life in defence and food 

 in offence. Your boy's supreme interest in the knife is a latent memory 

 of those ancient days. Those who could use the knife and use it well, 

 survived and transmitted this trait to their offspring. The same could 

 be said of the sling, the bow and arrow, and of sports like boxing, fenc- 

 ing, fishing, etc. 



Consider the fascination of fishing. This is not a practise and prepa- 

 ration for the real life of to-day, but a reverberation of racial activities. 

 In a summer resort where the writer was a visitor the past summer, day 

 after day the whole male population of the hotel resorted to the fishing 

 grounds. They paid two dollars and a half a day for a guide, seven dol- 

 lars a day for a motor-boat and a cent and a half apiece for worms. 

 Surely a stranger uninitiated into our habits of thought would have been 

 amazed to see these returning fishermen at night indifferently handing 

 over their catch to the guide. It was the fishing they desired, not the 

 fish, and yet great was their woe when one large fish was lost in the act 

 of landing. It is estimated by the New York Times that on Sundays 

 and holidays when the weather is fine, 25,000 people in New York City 

 go fishing at a minimum cost of one dollar each, and of these no doubt 

 more than 95 per cent, go for fun and not for the fish. At some stage 

 in the history of human development fishing was without doubt a gen- 

 eral means of subsistence. Those who could catch fish survived and 

 handed down this instinct. Likewise the fascination of gathering wild 



