6oo THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



ing require skill and close attention and tax mind as well as muscle. 

 But this is not the point. Our primitive ancestors had skill. To see 

 quickly and correlate nicely eye and hand or eye and foot was an early 

 acquisition. It is not this that fatigues us in modern life. It is the 

 everlasting, high-pressure grind. It is the holding ourselves down to 

 hard working and hard thinking and long-sustained tasks. It is analy- 

 sis, concentration, effort, dead lift of mind, the kind of psychosis that 

 digs Panama canals, perfects automobiles and airships, discovers new 

 laws of mind and matter in the laboratory, thinks out new fields for the 

 investment of capital, scrutinizes countless court records for precedents 

 in law which may clear our clients, holds the ship's captain on the 

 bridge in times of peril, keeps the soldier at his post and the clerk 

 at his desk through the long hours and the weary days. As the 

 strenuous life increases in city and country, there is an increased 

 demand for relaxation, whether in the form of baseball or foot- 

 ball, horse-racing or gambling, or in the form of the automobile 

 craze or the auction-bridge craze or the moving-picture craze or the 

 tango-dancing craze. These are all methods of escape from the clutch 

 of the modern strenuous life, exhibited in all countries, but most notice- 

 ably in America, for whatever it is that is driving the human race for- 

 ward in the path of progress so rapidly and relentlessly, seems to have 

 gripped the Anglo-Saxon people particularly hard. 



Even these many forms of relaxation are not sufficient to relieve the 

 overwrought brain centers, and so in ever-increasing amounts we have 

 recourse to artificial means of relaxation through narcotics, such as 

 alcohol, tobacco and other drugs. Alcohol by its slight paralysis of the 

 higher and later developed brain centers, accomplishes artificially what 

 is effected naturally by play and sport, that is, it liberates the older, 

 freer life of the emotions and the more primitive impulses. 



Thus from our new point of view the difficulties in regard to chil- 

 dren's play disappear. The reason why children play and why their 

 plays take reversionary forms is now evident. The higher brain centers, 

 those making work possible, are not developed. If a child does any- 

 thing, he must play, i. e., his activity must take the form prescribed by 

 the brain centers already developed, and these are the old racial tracts. 

 He is equipped with a nervous mechanism adequate for old racial ac- 

 tivities and for the most part with these only. The little girl hugging 

 and nursing her doll is not the victim of an instinct whose purpose is 

 to prepare her for later maternal duties. She is simply doing what her 

 mother and her grandmothers have done since the foundation of the 

 world. If they had not done so, she would never have been born. 



The child does not play because of surplus energy, for under normal 

 conditions all his energy is expended in play; the child is a playing 

 animal. Nor does he play because of an instinctive need of practise and 



