< Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu
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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELAXATION

nuts and berries is out of all proportion to the value of them when gathered. But nuts and berries were once of vital concern to our fathers.

It is in baseball and football, however, that we best see the historical significance of play. The daily paper is a good index of popular interest. Here we shall often find perhaps seven, perhaps twenty columns devoted to baseball, while no other single subject whether in politics, art, literature or science, aspires to two columns. How shall we explain the absorbing interest in baseball and football as well as in horse-racing and prize-fighting?

In baseball we have a game combining three of the most deep-seated racial instincts, the instinct to throw, to run and to strike. During untold periods of the life history of our race, survival has come to him who could throw the straightest, run the swiftest and strike the hardest. To throw something at something is almost as natural for a boy as to breathe. Throwing, batting, running are no longer of any service in this age of mind, but they were the conditions of survival in the distant past. Baseball reinstates those ancient attitudes and brings a thrill of cherished memories. Any one who has ever held a bat in hand and assumed the expectant attitude of the batter knows the peculiar thrill which is explained only by recalling that his distant ancestors in just that attitude beat down with a real club many an opposing foe, whether man or beast, and those who held clubs in this position and struck hard and quickly survived and transmitted this instinct. Dr. Gulick says:

Baseball is a complex of elements all of which date back certainly to our prehuman ancestors. The ability to throw a stone with accuracy and speed was at one time a basal factor in the struggle for survival. The early man who could seize a bough of a tree and strike with accuracy and great power was better fitted to survive in the brutal struggles of those early days than the man not so endowed. He could defend his family better, he was better fitted for killing game, he was better fitted for overcoming his enemies. The ability to run and dodge with speed and endurance was also a basal factor.[1]

The instinct to throw, as the same author shows, belongs to boys only, scarcely appearing in the case of girls. The awkward throw of girls, like the left arm throw of boys, is well-known. The plays of girls reveal their own set of instincts recalling the habits of primitive woman. "We are the descendants of those men who could throw and those women who loved children,"

Football excites still greater enthusiasm than baseball because it reinstates still more primitive forms of activity, for instance the face to face opposition of two hostile forces, the rude physical shock of the heavy opposing teams, the scrimmage-like, mêlée character of the collision, the tackling and dodging and the lively chases for goal, as for cover. The spectators at a great football game go wild and behave like children,

  1. ↑ Interest in Relation to Muscular Exercise, "by Luther Gulick, M.D., American Phys. Ed. Rev., Vol. VII., 2.
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