In all these modes of developing our efferent powers, we conceive that the race
comes very close to the individual youth, and that ancestral momenta animate
motor neurons and muscles and preside over most of the combinations. Some of
the elements speak with a still small voice raucous with age. The first
spontaneous movements of infancy are hieroglyphs, to most of which we have as
yet no good key. Many elements are so impacted and felted together that we can
not analyze them. Many are extinct and many perhaps made but once and only
hint things we can not apprehend. Later the rehearsals are fuller, and their
significance more intelligible, and in boyhood and youth the correspondences
are plain to all who have eyes to see. Pleasure is always exactly proportional to
the directness and force of the current of heredity, and in play we feel most fully
and intensely ancestral joys. The pain of toil died with our forebears; its vestiges
in our play give pure delight. Its variety prompts to diversity that enlarges our
life. Primitive men and animals played, and that too has left its traces in us.
Some urge that work was evolved or degenerated from play; but the play field
broadens with succeeding generations youth is prolonged, for play is always and
everywhere the best synonym of youth. All are young at play and only in play,
and the best possible characterization of old age is the absence of the soul and
body of play. Only senile and overspecialized tissues of brain, heart, and
muscles know it not.
Gulick[1] has urged that what makes certain exercises more interesting than
others is to be found in the phylon. The power to throw with accuracy and speed
was once pivotal for survival, and non-throwers were eliminated. Those who
could throw unusually well best overcame enemies, killed game, and sheltered
family. The nervous and muscular systems are organized with certain definite
tendencies and have back of them a racial setting. So running and dodging with
speed and endurance, and hitting with a club, were also basal to hunting and
fighting. Now that the need of these is leas urgent for utilitarian purposes, they
are still necessary for perfecting the organism. This makes, for instance, baseball
racially familiar, because it represents activities that were once and for a long
time necessary for survival. We inherit tendencies of muscular coördination that
have been of great racial utility. The best athletic sports and games a composed
of these racially old elements, so that phylogenetic muscular history is of great
importance. Why is it, this writer asks, that a city man so loves to sit all day and
fish! It is because this interest dates back to time immemorial. We are the sons of
fishermen, and early life was by the water's side, and this is our food supply.
This explains why certain exercises are more interesting than others. It is