Page:Indoor and Outdoor Gymnastic Games.djvu/22

14 predatory activities, hero-worship, and, most of all, the stage when '' ' team-work is the key-note. ' '' Not that all play team-work, but that is the ideal, the tendency of the period. It is the stage of co-ordination and self-sacrifice. The reason is obvious. 'Savages who have reached the stage of co-operation under a chief, of fighting in organized groups, are doing that which the Anglo-Saxon boy commences to do soon after he is twelve.' Thus, he explains, the youth rehearses his race instincts, and arrives at the age of adolescence to the period of highest development in his ancestors, that of self-sacrifice. Here his altruistic qualities begin to assert themselves, and he goes on to those higher developments of Christian thought and activity, reached only by the highly civilized (Anglo-Saxon) Christian man of to-day.

"The author goes further into the religious aspect of the subject, which we again recommend to the attention of our readers. The subject-matter seems of vital importance to the physical director of the Young Men's Christian Association.

"Enough has been said, we hope, to prove somewhat the value of games of the right kind, at the right time in the young man's life. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, while apparently knowing nothing of the systematic development of the man, as outlined by Dr. Gulick, must have had a presentiment of the value of play life. His thoughts are so delightfully apt and in line with the argument that we wish to express that we desire to quote from his 'Outdoor Papers':

" 'Never yet did an ill-starred young saint waste his Saturday afternoons in preaching sermons in the garret to his deluded little sisters and their dolls without living to repent it in maturity. The precocious little sentimentalists wither away like blanched potato plants in a cellar; and then comes some vigorous youth from his outdoor work or play and grasps the rudder of the age, as he grasped the oar, the bat or the plough.'

"Again, wisely said Horace Mann: 'All through the life of a pure-minded but feeble-bodied man, his path is lined with memory's gravestones, which mark the spots where noble enterprises perished for lack of physical vigor to embody them in deeds.'