Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/604

600 require skill and close attention and tax mind as well as muscle. But this is not the point. Our primitive ancestors had skill. To see quickly and correlate nicely eye and hand or eye and foot was an early acquisition. It is not this that fatigues us in modern life. It is the everlasting, high-pressure grind. It is the holding ourselves down to hard working and hard thinking and long-sustained tasks. It is analysis, concentration, effort, dead lift of mind, the kind of psychosis that digs Panama canals, perfects automobiles and airships, discovers new laws of mind and matter in the laboratory, thinks out new fields for the investment of capital, scrutinizes countless court records for precedents in law which may clear our clients, holds the ship's captain on the bridge in times of peril, keeps the soldier at his post and the clerk at his desk through the long hours and the weary days. As the strenuous life increases in city and country, there is an increased demand for relaxation, whether in the form of baseball or football, horse-racing or gambling, or in the form of the automobile craze or the auction-bridge craze or the moving-picture craze or the tango-dancing craze. These are all methods of escape from the clutch of the modern strenuous life, exhibited in all countries, but most noticeably in America, for whatever it is that is driving the human race forward in the path of progress so rapidly and relentlessly, seems to have gripped the Anglo-Saxon people particularly hard.

Even these many forms of relaxation are not sufficient to relieve the overwrought brain centers, and so in ever-increasing amounts we have recourse to artificial means of relaxation through narcotics, such as alcohol, tobacco and other drugs. Alcohol by its slight paralysis of the higher and later developed brain centers, accomplishes artificially what is effected naturally by play and sport, that is, it liberates the older, freer life of the emotions and the more primitive impulses.

Thus from our new point of view the difficulties in regard to children's play disappear. The reason why children play and why their plays take reversionary forms is now evident. The higher brain centers, those making work possible, are not developed. If a child does anything, he must play, i. e., his activity must take the form prescribed by the brain centers already developed, and these are the old racial tracts. He is equipped with a nervous mechanism adequate for old racial activities and for the most part with these only. The little girl hugging and nursing her doll is not the victim of an instinct whose purpose is to prepare her for later maternal duties. She is simply doing what her mother and her grandmothers have done since the foundation of the world. If they had not done so, she would never have been born.

The child does not play because of surplus energy, for under normal conditions all his energy is expended in play; the child is a playing animal. Nor does he play because of an instinctive need of practise and