THE PLAY OF ANIMALS 



ONE of the most important indirect results of Darwinism 

 has been to convince naturalists that no fact of life 

 is trivial. To the inquisitive spirit everything is a problem ; 

 but the problem is illumined when we realise, as Bagehot 

 put it, that " everything is an antiquity " the product of a 

 past often inconceivably long, an event, a personage, or, 

 it may be, only a " property " in the drama of evolution 

 which has filled the world-stage for millions of years. More- 

 over, it was part of Darwin's genius that he realised, more 

 than any other, the solidarity of Nature and the inter- 

 relations of things. The Systema Natures was the crowning 

 work of Linnaeus ; but it was a new system of Nature that 

 Darwin disclosed a web of life in which even the appar- 

 ently trivial fact is invested with momentous importance 

 because of its complex correlations with others. A moth, 

 escaping from an entomologist's window, is said to have 

 cost the United States a million of dollars ; a few sparrows 

 and rabbits, transported from their native home, disturb 

 the balance of life in two continents. The clay-clodlet 

 on a bird's foot may affect the fauna and flora of a district. 



Similarly, play whether of animals or of men which 

 would have been regarded by most pre-Darwinian natural- 

 ists as a trivial thing a sort of aside in Nature has been 

 shown by Professor Groos to be of fundamental importance. 

 Let us see how this works out. 



We need not spend time over any definition of play 

 that comes last, not first. We see it all around us in the 



Ml 



