Page:American Journal of Psychology Volume 21.djvu/158

148 the original club, and as the generations went by there were evolved all primitive means of striking, such as the ax, the hammer for crushing food, grains, nuts; the sword and other "instruments of warfare, industry and even sport."

That this long process of evolution, extending over a great period of time, should have left its stamp upon the soma and psyche of the race and thus upon modern childhood and early youth can hardly be doubted. We thus have at least a tentative explanation of this impulse of the child to strike anything and everything with such satisfaction, and of the youth who is never so happy as when he has a stick or whip in his hand striking real or imaginary objects.

As it was with striking so was it with throwing. There seems to be little doubt that this developed in the race as it does in the individual, namely from striking. In either case the only thing necessary to lead from striking to throwing would be that the instrument used for striking should accidentally leave the hand of the user while in the act of striking. Again, as in the case of the child, this might not teach its lesson the first time. But finally it would force itself upon the notice of the user and the force with which it would leave his hand and strike some object would finally be grasped. Here would be revealed the new power of bringing about results at some distance from the person throwing.

This again must have given new power for conquest that we can hardly overestimate. Here, again, perfection of the art meant new conquests, new dangers, and the application of the law of the survival of the fittest, and the handing down of this inheritance to after generations. Thus the tendency of the child to-day to throw balls, stones, snowballs, apples and anything else that he can get hold of, has its origin in these past ancestral experiences. The lovers of base ball may even be indulging in and expressing ancestral echoes.

It is a pretty well-established fact "That the fixedness of a tendency is roughly proportional to the length of time during which it has characterized the race." (Tyler, in the "Man in the Light of Evolution," p. 139.) The slow progress which our ancestors made gave this tendency an abundant opportunity to become deeply engraved upon the brain centres. This is illustrated in the animal world by "The shepherd dog and the bird dog brought up in the house apart from sheep and birds, who went the one after sheep and the other after birds as soon as turned loose in the fields. The stimulus of the appropriate object was all that was necessary to arouse the slumbering inherited instinct in the brain." (Tyler, in the "Man in the Light of Evolution," p. 137.)

The value of this point of view in its bearing upon