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 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 coördination 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 controlled from a higher level of nerve-cells. By right mastication, deglutition, etc., we are thus developing speech organs. Thus not only the kind but the time of forms and degrees of exercise is best prescribed by heredity. All growth is more or less rhythmic. There are seasons of rapid increment followed by rest and then perhaps succeeded by a period of augmentation, and this may occur several times. Roberts's fifth parliamentary report shows that systematic gymnastics, which, if applied at the right age, produce such immediate and often surprising development of lung capacity, utterly fail with boys of twelve, because this nascent period has not yet come. Donaldson showed that if the eyelid of a young kitten be forced open prematurely at birth and stimulated with light, medullation was premature and imperfect; so, too, if proper exercise is deferred too long, we know that little result is achieved. The sequence in which the maturation of levels, nerve areas, and bundles of fibers develop may be, as Flechsig thinks, causal; or, according to Cajal, energy, originally employed in growth by cell division, later passes to fiber extension and the development of latent cells; or as in young children, the nascent period of finger movements may stimulate that of the thumb which comes later, and the independent movement of the two eyes, their subsequent coördination, and so on to perhaps a third and yet higher level. Thus exercise ought to develop nature's first intention and fulfil the law of nascent periods, or else not only no good but great harm may be done. Hence every determination of these periods is of great practical as well as scientific importance. The following are the chief attempts yet made to fix them, which show the significance of adolescence.
The doll curve reaches its point of highest intensity between eight and nine,[3] and it is nearly ended at fifteen, although it may persist. Children can give no better reason why they stop playing with dolls than because other things are liked better, or they are too old, ashamed, love real babies, etc. The Roman girl, when ripe for marriage, hung up her childhood doll as a votive offering to Venus. Mrs. Carlyle, who was compelled to stop, made sumptuous dresses and a four-post bed, and made her doll die upon a funeral pyre like Dido, after speaking her last farewell and stabbing herself with a penknife by way of Tyrian sword. At thirteen or fourteen it is more distinctly realized that dolls are not real, because they have no inner life or feeling, yet many continue to play with them with great pleasure, in secret, till well on in the teens or twenties. Occasionally single women or married women with no children, and in rare cases even those who have children, play dolls all their lives. Gales's[4] student concluded that the girls who played with dolls up to or into pubescent years were usually those who had the fewest number, that they played with them in the most realistic manner, kept them because actually most fond of them, and were likely to be more scientific, steady, and less sentimental than those who dropped them early. But the instinct that "dollifies" new or most unfit things is gone, as also the subtle points of contact between doll play and idolatry. Before puberty dolls are more likely to be adults; after puberty they are almost always children or babies. There is no longer a struggle between doubt and reality in the doll cosmos, no more abandon to the doll illusion; but where it lingers it is a more atavistic rudiment, and just as at the height of the fever dolls are only in small part representatives of future children, the saying that the first child is the last doll is probably false. Nor are doll and child comparable to first and second dentition, and it is doubtful if children who play with dolls as children with too great abandonment are those who make the best mothers later, or if it has any value as a preliminary practise of motherhood. The number of motor activities that are both inspired and unified by this form of play and that can always be given wholesome direction is almost incredible, and has been too long neglected both by psychologists and teachers. Few purer types of the rehearsal by the individual of the history of the race can probably be found even though we can not yet analyze the many elements involved and assign to each its phyletic correlate.
In an interesting paper Dr. Gulick[5] divides play into three childish periods, separated by the ages three and seven, and attempts to characterize the plays of early adolescence from twelve to seventeen and of later adolescence from seventeen to twenty-three. Of the first two periods he says, children before seven rarely play games spontaneously, but often do so under the stimulus of older persons. From seven to twelve, games are almost exclusively individualistic and competitive, but in early adolescence "two elements predominate—first, the plays are predominantly team games, in which the individual is more or less sacrificed for the whole, in which there is obedience to a captain, in which there is coöperation among a number for a given end, in which play has a program and an end. The second characteristic of the period is with reference to its plays, and there seems to be all of savage out-of-door life—hunting, fishing, stealing, swimming, rowing, sailing, fighting, hero-worship, adventure, love of animals, etc. This characteristic obtains more with boys than with girls." "The plays of adolescence are socialistic, demanding the heathen virtues of courage, endurance, self-control, bravery, loyalty, enthusiasm."
Croswell[6] found that among 2,000 children familiar with 700 kinds of amusements, those involving physical exercises predominated over all others, and that "at every age after the eighth year they were represented as almost two to one and in the sixteenth year rose among boys as four to one." The age of the greatest number of different amusements is from ten to eleven, nearly fifteen being mentioned, but for the next eight or nine years there is a steady decline of number, and progressive specialisation occurs. The games of chase, which are suggestive on the recapitulation theory, rise from eleven per cent in boys of six to nineteen per cent at nine, but soon after decline, and at sixteen have fallen to less than four per cent. Toys and original make-believe games decline still earlier, while ball rises steadily and rapidly to eighteen, and card and table games rise very steadily from ten to fifteen in girls, but the increment is much less in boys. "A third or more of all the amusements of boys just entering their teens are games of contest—games in which the end is in one way or another to gain an advantage one's fellows, in which the interest is n the struggle between peers." "As children approach the teens, a tendency arises that is well expressed by one of the girls who no longer makes playthings but things that are useful." Parents and society must, therefore, provide the most favorable conditions for the kind of amusement fitting at each age. As the child grows older, society plays a larger rôle in all the child's amusements, and from the thirteenth year "amusements take on a decidedly coöperative and competitive character, and efforts are ore and more confined to the accomplishments of some definite aim. The course for this period will concentrate the effort upon fewer lines," and more time will be devoted to each. The desire for mastery is now at its height. The instinct is to maintain one's self independently and ask no odds. At fourteen, 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 well as how rhythm eases work and also makes it social. Most of the old work-canticles are lost, and machines have made work more serial, while rhythms are obscured or imposed from without so as to limit the freedom they used to express. Now all basal, central, or strength movements tend to be oscillatory, automatically repetitive, or rhythmic like savage music, as if the waves of the primeval sea whence we came still beat in them, just as all fine peripheral and late movements tend to be serial, special, vastly complex, end diversified. It is thus natural that during the period of greatest strength increment in muscular development, the rhythmic function of nearly all fundamental movements should be strongly accentuated. At the dawn of this age boys love marching; and, as our returns show, there is a very remarkable rise in the passion for beating time, jigging, double shuffling, rhythmic clapping, etc. The more prominent the factor of repetition the more automatic and the less strenuous is the hard and new effort of constant psychic adjustment and attention. College yells, cheers, rowing, marching, processions, bicycling, running, tug-of-war, calisthenics and class gymnastics with counting, and especially with music, horseback riding, etc., are rhythmic; tennis, baseball and football, basketball, golf, polo, etc., are less rhythmic, but are concerted and intense. These latter emphasise the conflict factor, best brought out in fencing, boxing, and wrestling, and lay more stress on the psychic elements of attention and skill. The effect of musical accompaniment, which the Swedish system wrongly rejects, is to make the exercises more fundamental and automatic, and to proportionately diminish the conscious effort and relieve the neuro-muscular mechanism involved in fine movements.
Adolescence is the golden period of nascency for rhythm. Before this change many children have a very imperfect sense of it, and even those who march, sing, play, or read poetry with correct and overemphasised time marking, experience a great broadening of the horizon of consciousness, and a marked, and, for mental power and scope, all-conditioning increase in the carrying power of attention and the sentence-sense. The soul now feels the beauty of cadences, good ascension, and the symmetry of well-developed periods—and all, as I am convinced, because this is the springtime of the strength movements which are predominantly rhythmic. Not only does music start in time marking, the drum being the oldest instrument, but quantity long took precedence of sense and form of content, both melody and words coming later. Even rhythmic tapping or beating of the foot (whence the poetic feet of prosody and meter thus later imposed monotonous prose to make poetry) exhilarates, makes glad the soul and inspires it to attack, gives compulsion and a sense of unity. The psychology of rhythm shows its basal value in cadencing the soul. We can not conceive what war, love, and religion would be without it. The old adage that "the parent of prose is poetry, the parent of poetry is music, the parent of music is rhythm, and the parent of rhythm is God" seems borne out not only in history, but by the nature of thought and attention that does not move in a continuum, but flies and perches alternately, or on stepping-stones and as if influenced by the tempo of the leg swinging as a compound pendulum.
Dancing is one of the best expressions of pure play and of the motor needs of youth. Perhaps it is the most liberal of all forms of motor education. Schopenhauer thought it the apex of physiological irritability and that it made animal life most vividly conscious of its existence and most exultant in exhibiting it. In very ancient times China ritualised it in the spring and made it a large part of the education of boys after the age of thirteen. Neale thinks it was originally circular or orbicular worship, which he deems oldest. In Japan, in the priestly Salic College of ancient Rome, in Egypt, in the Greek Apollo cult, it was a form of worship. St. Basil advised it; St. Gregory introduced it into religious services. The early Christian bishops, called præsuls, led the sacred dance around the altar; and only in 692, and again in 1617, was it forbidden in church. Neale and others have shown how the choral processionals with all the added charm of vestment and intonation have had far more to do in Christianizing many low tribes, who could not understand the language of the church, than has preaching. Savages are nearly all great dancers, imitating every animal they know, dancing out their own legends, with ritual sometimes so exacting that error means death. The character of people is often learned from their dances, and Molière says the destiny of nations depends on them. The gayest dancers are often among the most downtrodden and unhappy people. Some mysteries can be revealed only in them, as holy passion-plays. If we consider the history of secular dances, we find that some of them, when first invented or in vogue, evoked the greatest enthusiasm. One writer says that the polka so delighted France and England that statesmen forgot politics. The spirit of the old Polish aristocracy still lives in the polonaise. The gipsy dances have inspired a new school of music. The Greek drama grew out of the evolution of the tragic chorus. National dances like the hornpipe and reel of Scotland, the Reihen, of Germany, the rondes of France, the Spanish tarantella and chaconne, the strathspey from the Spey Valley, the Irish jig, etc., express racial traits. Instead of the former vast repertory, the stately pavone, the graceful and dignified saraband, the wild salterrelle, the bourrée with song and strong rhythm, the light and skippy bolero, the courtly bayedere, the dramatic plugge, gavotte, and other peasant dances in costume, the fast and furious fandango, weapon and military dances; in place of the pristine power to express love, mourning, justice, penalty, fear, anger, consolation, divine service, symbolic and philosophical conceptions, and every industry or characteristic act of life in pantomime and gesture, we have in the dance of the modern ballroom only a degenerate relict, with at best but a very insignificant culture value, and too often stained with bad associations. This is most unfortunate for youth, and for their sake a work of rescue and revival is greatly needed; for it is perhaps, not excepting even music, the completest language of the emotions and can be made one of the best schools of sentiment and even will, inculcating good states of mind and exorcising bad ones as few other agencies have power to do. Right dancing can cadence the very soul, give nervous poise and control, bring harmony between basal and finer muscles, and also between feeling and intellect, body and mind. It can serve both as an awakener and a test of intelligence, predispose the heart against vice, and turn the springs of character toward virtue. That its present decadent forms, for those too devitalized to dance aright, can be demoralizing, we know in this day too well, although even questionable dances may sometimes work off vicious propensities in ways more harmless than those in which they would otherwise find vent. Its utilization for and influence on the insane would be another interesting chapter.
Very interesting scientifically and suggestive practically is another correspondence which I believe to be new, between the mode of spontaneous activity in youth and that of labor in the early history of the race. One of the most marked distinctions between savage and civilized races is in the longer rhythm of work and relaxation. The former are idle and lazy for days, weeks, and perhaps months, and then put forth intense and prolonged effort in dance, hunt, warfare, migration, or construction, sometimes dispensing with sleep and manifesting remarkable endurance. As civilization and specialization advance, hours become regular. The cultured man is less desultory in all his habits, from eating and sleeping to performing social and religious duties, although he may put forth no more aggregate energy in a year than the savage. Women are schooled to regular work long before men, and the difficulty of imposing civilization upon low races is compared by Bücher[8] to that of training a eat to work when harnessed to a dog-cart. It is not dread of fatigue but of the monotony of method makes them hate labor. The effort of savages is more intense and their periods of rest more prolonged and inert. Darwin thinks all vital function bred to go in periods, as vertebrates are descended from tidal ascidian.[9] There is indeed much that suggests some other irregular rhythm more or less independent of day and night, and perhaps sexual in its nature, but not lunar, and for males. This mode of life not only preceded the industrial and commercial period of which regularity is a prime condition, but it lasted indefinitely longer than the latter has yet existed; during this early time great exertion, sometimes to the point of utter exhaustion and collapse, alternated with seasons of almost vegetative existence. We see abundant traces of this psychosis in the muscle habits of adolescents, and, I think, in student and particularly in college life, which can enforce regularity only to a limited extent. This is not reversion, but partly expression of the nature and perhaps the needs of this stage of immaturity, and partly the same instinct of revolt against uniformity imposed from without, which rob life of variety and extinguish the spirit of adventure and untrammeled freedom, and make the savage hard to break to the harness of civilization. The hunger for fatigue, too, can become a veritable passion and is quite distinct from either the impulse for activity for its own sake or the desire of achievement. To shout and put forth the utmost possible strength in crude ways is erethic intoxication at a stage when every tissue can become erectile and seems, like the crying of infants, to have a legitimate function in causing tension and flushing, enlarging the caliber of blood vessels, and forcing the blood perhaps even to the point of extravasation to irrigate newly growing fibers, cells, and organs which atrophy if not thus fed. When maturity is complete this need abates. If this be correct, the phenomenon of second breath, so characteristic of adolescence, and one factor in the inebriate's propensity, is ontogenetic expression of a rhythm trait of a long racial period. Youth needs overexertion to compensate for underexertion, to undersleep in order to offset oversleep at times. This seems to be nature's provision to expand in all directions its possibilities of the body and soul in this plastic period when, without this occasional excess, powers would atrophy or suffer arrest for want of use, or larger possibilities world not be realized without this regimen peculiar to nascent periods. This is treated more fully elsewhere.