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