Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/823

Rh not exist, but because children vary so much—some are precocious, others are slow. All that is attempted is to have years in which it is possible to recognize certain great groups of activities. In this classification, it must be remembered that each group includes all the preceding. The individual loses nothing as he grows. Everything that he has acquired remains to him as a joy and a recreation if it is in the right relations. The baby will play with sand for hours, making marks with his fingers, picking up a handful and letting it trickle out. Such simple plays as these never lose their interest. I have watched individuals sitting on the seashore playing with the sand for an hour at a time; so that when I shall attempt to define the plays of adolescents, let me not be understood as meaning that these are the only plays of adolescents, for adolescents do all that the preceding groups have done. That which I shall attempt to describe will be the plays that the adolescents have that are not found to any particular extent before adolescence, and which may thus be called characteristics of adolescence.

The divisions that I have made are: (1) Babyhood, approximately from birth to three; (2) early childhood, three to seven; (3) childhood, seven to twelve; (4) early adolescence, twelve to seventeen; (5) later adolescence, seventeen to twenty-three.

It is evident by this time that I am using the word play in a broad sense, including games, but not limited by games. I do not care to discuss the whole subject of games, but am concerned with those that involve muscular activity and co-ordination.

How do babies play? They love to rattle paper, to take hold of things, to muss paper up, to pick things up and drop them, watching the result, to roll a ball, to push and pull things around with their hands; they delight in playing with sand and dirt, and stones, and bugs, toddling after the hens; they delight to splash water, and many other such simple activities. They all seem to care for anything involving accurate muscular co-ordination.

During early childhood—three to seven—children enjoy building with blocks. At first the buildings are simple and regular—the blocks stood up in rows more or less equidistant The idea of regularity appears to be definite, but little idea of symmetry until the latter part of this period, and then I suspect that it is the copying of older children. Children enjoy swinging, are fond of climbing, will climb low trees, will climb chairs, will climb banisters, experiment with jumping from chairs, with jumping from steps. All our children have gone through a stage of wishing to cut things. The attachment for dolls comes in the latter part of this period among girls. We started with the idea that, until puberty, boys' and girls' minds were just alike except so far as they were trained differently by their