Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/264

260 and it embraces a considerable portion of our daily activity. It is most perfectly typified in play and sport, but includes many other forms of human interest and activity, such, for instance, as the enjoyment of music, of the drama and of other forms of fine art, the reading of fiction, and countless other kinds of amusement and entertainment not commonly included under the terms play or sport.

But it is in children's play and in adult sport that we find the principles of relaxation best exhibited as they will be found presently to bear upon our problem. The active life of the child is almost wholly a life of play. The brain centers developed late in the history of the race come to maturity late in the life of the child. Hence he rebels instinctively against work, for it involves yet undeveloped centers, those connected with spontaneous and sustained attention. Play is self-developing and supplies its own interest. Furthermore, a study of children's plays shows that they are largely reversionary in form, following the old racial activities of our remote ancestors. The boy, therefore, runs, races, rolls, wrestles, wades, swims, climbs trees, shoots with sling or with bow and arrow, goes hunting, fishing, canoeing, camping, builds tree houses, cave houses, wigwams and pursues a hundred occupations recalling the life of primitive man and far removed from the serious life of modern man, the life of the farm, the shop, the office, the factory, the bank or the schoolroom. The brain paths involved in children's play are the old time-worn easy paths requiring no new associations, no abstractions, no strong and sustained effort of will or attention.

In adult sport we have a still better illustration of the principles of relaxation. If we recall those forms of sport which afford the most perfect rest and relaxation, we shall see how true it is that they are of a character to use the old racial brain paths and rest the higher and newer centers. The tired teacher, lawyer, doctor, preacher or business man, when his vacation comes, reverts to the habits of primitive man. He takes his tent, rod, gun or canoe and goes to forest, lake or mountain, wears more primitive clothes, sleeps on the ground and cooks over a camp fire. Hunting, swimming, yachting, dancing, wrestling, prize-fighting, horse racing—all these are illustrations of the rest afforded by primitive activities. As forms of relaxation they seem so natural to us that often we do not realize how primitive they are and how far removed from the real work-a-day world of modern life, the world of mental concentration, of pen and ink and books, of clerks and stenographers, of office and court room, of flats and congested cities, of business and finance. A football game, which resembles the rough and tumble physical contests of former days, brings together fifty thousand wildly enthusiastic spectators, while an intercollegiate debate commands at most only a handful of hearers with mild enthusiasm, so great is the need of some form of relaxation that shall completely relieve the tension of modern life. The gladiatorial exhibitions of old