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 cooerdination 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 because they
touch and revive the deep basic emotions of the race. Thus we see that
play is not doing things to be useful later, but it is rehearsing
racial history. Plays and games change only in their external form,
but the underlying neuro-muscular activities, and also the psychic
content of them, are the same. Just as psychic states must be lived
out up through the grades, so the physical activities most be played
off, each in its own time.

The best exercise for the young should thus be more directed to
develop the basal powers old to the race than those peculiar to the
individual, and it should enforce those psycho-neural and muscular
forms which race habit has banded down rather than insist upon those
arbitrarily designed to develop our ideas of symmetry regardless of
heredity. The best guide to the former is _interest_, zest, and
spontaneity. Hereditary moment, really determine, too, the order in
which nerve centers come into function. The oldest, racial parts come
first, and those which are higher and represent volition come in much
later.[2] As Hughlings Jackson has well shown, speech uses most of the
same organs as does eating, but those concerned with the former are