Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/598

594 upon the horse is shown in the instinct of the child of to-day to play horse, to ride a rocking-horse or a stick or anything. The child's first musical instruments, the rattle, the drum and the horn, were the first musical instruments of primitive man. These illustrations could be multiplied indefinitely. They show the limitations of the Groos theory of play, for none of the plays of this class have much to do in preparing the child for the life of to-day, or in giving him special practise for his future work. We ourselves are so much slaves of the past in our habits of thought that we do not easily realize how far from the actual life of the present day is this play-life of the child. The real world of to-day is that of the laboratory, the school, the library, the bank, the office, the shop, the street, the factory, the farm and the railroad. Notwithstanding the child's strong imitative bent, his world, as shown in his tales, his dreams and the plays he loves best, is that of the forest, the stream, the camp, the cave, the. hunting-ground and the battlefield.

Everything which has such a vital and absorbing interest for the boy has had at one time in our racial history an actual life and death interest for mankind. Take, for instance, the jackknife. How many knives has your boy had and lost and what rich joy there is in every new one! We see how the practise and preparation theory of play fails here. The knife has no significance in society now. It has degenerated to mere finger-nail purposes. But at one time it meant life in defence and food in offence. Your boy's supreme interest in the knife is a latent memory of those ancient days. Those who could use the knife and use it well, survived and transmitted this trait to their offspring. The same could be said of the sling, the bow and arrow, and of sports like boxing, fencing, fishing, etc.

Consider the fascination of fishing. This is not a practise and preparation for the real life of to-day, but a reverberation of racial activities. In a summer resort where the writer was a visitor the past summer, day after day the whole male population of the hotel resorted to the fishing grounds. They paid two dollars and a half a day for a guide, seven dollars a day for a motor-boat and a cent and a half apiece for worms. Surely a stranger uninitiated into our habits of thought would have been amazed to see these returning fishermen at night indifferently handing over their catch to the guide. It was the fishing they desired, not the fish, and yet great was their woe when one large fish was lost in the act of landing. It is estimated by the New York Times that on Sundays and holidays when the weather is fine, 25,000 people in New York City go fishing at a minimum cost of one dollar each, and of these no doubt more than 95 per cent, go for fun and not for the fish. At some stage in the history of human development fishing was without doubt a general means of subsistence. Those who could catch fish survived and handed down this instinct. Likewise the fascination of gathering wild