ideals--Showing off--Cold baths--Hill climbing--The playground
movement--The psychology of play--Its relation to work.

Play, sports, and games constitute a more varied, far older, and more
popular field. Here a very different spirit of joy and gladness rules.
Artifacts often enter but can not survive unless based upon pretty
purely hereditary momentum. Thus our first problem is to seek both the
motor tendencies and the psychic motives bequeathed to us from the
past. The view of Groos that play is practise for future adult
activities is very partial, superficial, and perverse. It ignores the
past where lie the keys to all play activities. True play never
practises what is phyletically new; and this, industrial life often
calls for. It exercises many atavistic and rudimentary functions, a
number of which will abort before maturity, but which live themselves
out in play like the tadpole's tail, that must be both developed and
used as a stimulus to the growth of legs which will otherwise never
mature. In place of this mistaken and misleading view, I regard play
as the motor habits and spirit of the past of the race, persisting in
the present, as rudimentary functions sometimes of and always akin to
rudimentary organs. The best index and guide to the stated activities
of adults in past ages is found in the instinctive, untaught, and
non-imitative plays of children which are the most spontaneous and
exact expressions of their motor needs. The young grow up into the
same forms of motor activity, as did generations that have long
preceded them, only to a limited extent; and if the form of every
human occupation were to change to-day, play would be unaffected save
in some of its superficial imitative forms. It would develop the motor
capacities, impulses, and fundamental forms of our past heritage, and
the transformation of these into later acquired adult forms is
progressively later. In play every mood and movement is instinct with