In all these modes of developing our efferent powers, we conceive that the race comes very close to the individual youth, and that ancestral momenta animate motor neurons and muscles and preside over most of the combinations. Some of the elements speak with a still small voice raucous with age. The first spontaneous movements of infancy are hieroglyphs, to most of which we have as yet no good key. Many elements are so impacted and felted together that we can not analyze them. Many are extinct and many perhaps made but once and only hint things we can not apprehend. Later the rehearsals are fuller, and their significance more intelligible, and in boyhood and youth the correspondences are plain to all who have eyes to see. Pleasure is always exactly proportional to the directness and force of the current of heredity, and in play we feel most fully and intensely ancestral joys. The pain of toil died with our forebears; its vestiges in our play give pure delight. Its variety prompts to diversity that enlarges our life. Primitive men and animals played, and that too has left its traces in us. Some urge that work was evolved or degenerated from play; but the play field broadens with succeeding generations youth is prolonged, for play is always and everywhere the best synonym of youth. All are young at play and only in play, and the best possible characterization of old age is the absence of the soul and body of play. Only senile and overspecialized tissues of brain, heart, and muscles know it not.
Gulick[1] has urged that what makes certain exercises more interesting than others is to be found in the phylon. The power to throw with accuracy and speed was once pivotal for survival, and non-throwers were eliminated. Those who could throw unusually well best overcame enemies, killed game, and sheltered family. The nervous and muscular systems are organized with certain definite tendencies and have back of them a racial setting. So running and dodging with speed and endurance, and hitting with a club, were also basal to hunting and fighting. Now that the need of these is leas urgent for utilitarian purposes, they are still necessary for perfecting the organism. This makes, for instance, baseball racially familiar, because it represents activities that were once and for a long time necessary for survival. We inherit tendencies of muscular coördination that have been of great racial utility. The best athletic sports and games a composed of these racially old elements, so that phylogenetic muscular history is of great importance. Why is it, this writer asks, that a city man so loves to sit all day and fish! It is because this interest dates back to time immemorial. We are the sons of fishermen, and early life was by the water's side, and this is our food supply. This explains why certain exercises are more interesting than others. It is because they touch and revive the deep basic emotions of the race. Thus we see that play is not doing things to be useful later, but it is rehearsing racial history. Plays and games change only in their external form, but the underlying neuro-muscular activities, and also the psychic content of them, are the same. Just as psychic states must be lived out up through the grades, so the physical activities most be played off, each in its own time.
