Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/829

Rh stages of the race. The sedentary life does not call for the development of muscle, heart, lungs, bones, viscera, and brain. This must come to the individual as they come to the race. The rational system of public-school physical training will provide not only for the physical development that comes through formal gymnastics, but it will put in the foreground the development of the play instinct. We shall see that the right of natural order is adhered to in the gradual unfolding of the individual in its plays and games.

With speech and writing we have means of perpetuating and communicating knowledge that enables the race to progress far faster than was possible when each achievement was won only when it became incorporated into the neural structure of the race. With the increasing sum of knowledge that seems necessary for the adult, it is becoming increasingly difficult properly to fit the youth for life. We must crowd the studies back into earlier and earlier years. This education we may call organic. I plead for the old organic education, somatic development. This superorganic education is of no avail unless the individual has those inheritances from the race that fit him to live. Muscular activity and play form the fundamental basis of the psychical nature; and yet both of these we seem to be trying to crowd out. Our beautiful cities are growing up without playgrounds, and yet there is nothing in all the world more dear to us than the wholesome development of our children. We demand that children shall sit still in school; this seems necessary, but it would be quite possible to secure all the results of the superorganic education, and to have at the same time children who have their right and full development, through play and muscular training.

It seems to me that this matter of play is related to the deeper problems not only of education and psychology, but to religion and sociology as well. Our schools may train the intellect, but the great bulk of the training of the will and feelings, both of which are higher than the intellect, receive their chief development through play.

Muscular activity may not be so important for adults, but it is fundamental in youth and childhood. Civilization—city life—is taking away both muscular work and play.

What will America do for her children? How much are wholesome, wholly developed children worth?

ecclesiastic recently, in one of his sermons, told what he said was an authentic story of Le Verrier, that when one of his friends, congratulating him after the discovery of Neptune, remarked, "You are very near the stars, my dear friend," "I hope," replied Le Verrier, "to get farther than that; I expect to go to heaven." Le Verrier was an earnest Christian and profoundly spiritually minded. He is said to have had a large crucifix placed in the instrument room of the observatory.