especially, the impulse is, in manual training, to make something and perhaps to
coöperate.
McGhee[7] collected the play preferences of 15,718 children, and found a very
steady decline in running plays among girls from nine to eighteen, but a far more
rapid rise in plays of chance from eleven to fifteen, and a very rapid rise from
sixteen to eighteen. From eleven onward with the most marked fall before
fourteen, there was a distinct decline in imitative games for girls and a slower
one for boys. Games involving rivalry increased rapidly among boys from
eleven to sixteen and still more rapidly among girls, their percentage of
preference even exceeding that of boys at eighteen, when it reached nearly
seventy per cent. With adolescence, specialization upon a few plays was
markedly increased in the teens among boys, whereas with girls in general there
were a large number of plays which were popular with none preëminent. Even at
this age the principle of organization in games so strong with boys is very slight
with girls. Puberty showed the greatest increase of interest among pubescent
girls for croquet, and among boys for swimming, although baseball and football,
the most favored for boys, rose rapidly. Although the author does not state it, it
would seem from his data that plays peculiar to the different seasons were most
marked among boys, in part, at least, because their activities are more out of
doors.
Ferrero and others have shown that the more intense activities of primitive
people tend to be rhythmic and with strongly automatic features. No form of
activity is more universal than the dance, which is not only intense but may
express chiefly in terms of fundamental movements, stripped of their accessory
finish and detail, every important act, vocation, sentiment, or event in the life of
man in language so universal and symbolic that music and poetry themselves
seem to have arisen out of it. Before it became specialized much labor was cast
in rhythmic form and often accompanied by time-marking and even tone to
secure the stimulus of concert on both economic and social principles. In the
dark background of history there is now much evidence that at some point, play,
art, and work were not divorced. They all may have sprung from rhythmic
movement which is so deep-seated in biology because it secures most joy of life
with least expense. By it Eros of old ordered chaos, and by its judicious use the
human soul is cadenced to great efforts toward high ideals. The many work-
songs to secure concerted action in lifting, pulling, stepping, the use of flail,
lever, saw, ax, hammer, hoe, loom, etc., show that areas and thesis represent
flexion and extension, that accent originated in the acme of muscular stress, as