320 THE EVOLUTION OF ANIMAL BEHAVIOUR 
traded with his talents at the bank of play. In animal life, on 
the perceptual plane, we have the same need for training in little 
things and seemingly unimportant matters in preparation for 
the stress and storm which may, nay must, come upon them, that 
we find in men and women on the higher ethical plane. To 
those who think that the play of animals is too trifling a thing 
to affect the question of survival, we would suggest the applica- 
tion, with a necessary difference, of the thought which Miss 
Edith Simcox puts into the following words: “ Does it,” she 
says, “seem a trifling thing to say that in the hours of 
passionate trial and temptation a man can have no better help 
than his own past ? Every generous feeling that has not been 
crushed, every wholesome impulse that has been followed, 
every just perception, every habit of unselfish action, will be 
present in the background to guide or to sustain. It is too 
late, when the storm has burst, to provide our craft with 
rigging fit to weather it ; but we may find a purpose for the 
years that oppress us by their dull calm, if we elect to spend 
them in laying up stores of strength and wisdom and emotional 
prejudices of a goodly human kind, whereby, if need arises, we 
may be able to resist hereafter the gusts of passion that might 
else bear us out of the straightforward course.” To apply the 
thought, the trifles of play supply the psychological rigging 
which alone can save the animal craft in the coming storm of 
the struggle for existence. And the point on which we have 
to lay special stress in this section is, that it is psychological 
rigging—or, if this seems to lay too much emphasis on the 
genesis of conscious situations, we may at least urge that the 
psychological ropes are of co-ordinate importance with the bio- 
logical spars. 
So far, then, we reach the following conclusion : that if we 
classify the behaviour of the higher and more intelligent 
animals under two heads, the one comprising all those acts 
which are of direct biological value in enabling the animal to 
escape elimination under the immediate stress of the struggle 
for existence, and the other including all those acts which are 
of indirect preparatory or educative value, the latter, which are 
