SUB-HUMAN CULTURE BEGINNINGS 



333 



of individual life experiences, the social 

 importance of restraints. The inference 

 would be that from soon after the time 

 when men began to possess institutions, 

 and were able to formulate these in speech, 

 they have never seriously swerved from 

 an insistence on a social limitation of the 

 natural sex impulse. 



PLAY AS AN ELEMENT IN INVENTION 



Play is evidently an important element 

 in chimpanzee invention. Situations are 

 often first met, or devices prepared, not 

 from a desire to achieve a useful end, but 

 as a matter of sport or amusement, as a 

 means of satisfying pure manipulative 

 interest; the utilization is later. Here 

 again we have parallels with human 

 culture. The lodestone or magnet was 

 long a toy, or an object of pre-scientific 

 marveling, before it was used in the com- 

 pass and still later in machinery. The 

 Chinese placed a compass on "south point- 

 ing chariots," where it could have served 

 no purpose other than as a refinement of 

 luxury, nearly a thousand years before 

 they employed it in the serious business 

 of navigation. They knew gunpowder 

 in fireworks centuries before they put 

 it into firearms. In fact, in both cases 

 the Chinese play invention seems to have 

 passed to other peoples, the Arabs and 

 Mongols, to have been turned by them to 

 more practical purposes, and then to 

 have been re-introduced into China. 



The domestication of animals, although 

 its whole history is far from clear, appears 

 to derive at least in part from the keeping 

 of pets. To be sure, the keeping of a 

 pet, which may be played with so long as 

 it is amusing, and allowed to starve or 

 escape when it becomes troublesome to 

 maintain, is a different thing from the 

 tiring business of continuously caring for 

 flocks on which living depends. Also, of 

 the numerous species of animals which are 



interesting enough as pets, many are of 

 no economic utility, and others are in- 

 capable of being domesticated to the point 

 where they can be regularly handled and 

 fed and reared with economic profit. 

 Still, it is clear that many primitive 

 peoples who never rear either domesti- 

 cated animals or plants do keep pets 

 frequently. It can hardly be doubted, 

 therefore, that a stage of play domestica- 

 tion preceded economic domestication of 

 animals in the course of human history. 

 Among us occidental moderns the 

 process of invention is difficult to under- 

 stand; perhaps because we cannot yet suffi- 

 ciently extricate ourselves from our own 

 civilization to look upon its processes 

 with the same objectivity with which 

 we view those of foreign or ancient cul- 

 tures. Nevertheless, one thinks of the 

 pneumatic tire, first employed on the 

 bicycle in the period when this was a 

 novelty and instrument of sport, but 

 gradually helping the motor car to de- 

 velop into the important element which it 

 now forms in our economic structure. 



SCIENCE AS A FORM OF PLAY 



Modern invention is of course com- 

 pletely interwoven with modern science. 

 Now, time and again scientists have 

 pointed out, sometimes when they were 

 asking for money and sometimes when 

 they meant what they said, that the 

 progress of applied science or invention 

 depends on the progress of pure science or 

 discovery. Researches which, at the time 

 they were made, could not have been 

 conceived of as leading to practical re- 

 sults, have nevertheless again and again 

 led before long to the invention of useful 

 contrivances. The whole history of elec- 

 trical discovery is a case in point. Now 

 the significance of this, in the present 

 connection, is that pure science is, after 

 all, play. We are accustomed to think of 



