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 preeminent. 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