PSYCHOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY OF PLAY. 185 And conversely, human play, in its resemblances to the serious activities of lower stages of human and animal life, supplies a parallel to the biological doctrine of recapitulation. But it is one thing to hold recapitulation as an empirical law and another to declare its necessity. Whilst admitting the very great range of this doctrine in development, Prof. A. M. Marshall l tells us that the study of biological develop- ment discloses to us also " a series of ingenious, determined, varied, but more or less unsuccessful efforts to escape from the necessity of recapitulating, and to substitute for the ancestral process a more direct method ". Prof. Miall, 2 who is hardly a thorough -going recapitula- tionist, thinks " certain facts in the development of individ- uals have an historical significance and cannot be explained by mere adaption to present circumstances ; further, that adaptions tend to be inherited at corresponding phases, both in the ontogeny and the phylogeny ". ^Recapitulation in biology, therefore, will not cover the whole field, but the great range of its application is admitted. If then, we are not to suppose function entirely dissociated from structure, we should expect to find the work of one age becoming the play of the next. To take one instance. The boy who ' plays ' truant is usually marked out from his fejlows by "impulsiveness, lack of persistence, impatience of restraint, carelessness of person, indifference toward pro- perty, and lack of sympathy". He "stands like an outcrop of an older formation, pointing the genetic psychologist back to the probable origin of the migrating instinct ". 3 But it is not merely the truant who so strikingly illustrates a recapitulation theory ; in fact, such a case is atavistic rather than normally recapitulatory. The great support to this theory comes from facts col- lected over a much wider field, and from average specimens of humanity. "Mr. J. J. Jegi, summing up the general results of the tests of some 8,000 school children in New York by J. P. Taylor, in California by Miss H. M. Willard, in Massa- chusetts by Will. S. Monroe, and in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, by himself, as to their 'hopes,' 'ambitions,' 'vocational interests,' etc., observes : ' In these four studies alone we have tested about 8,000 school children, and there appears to be a wonderful agreement in all of them, as well as in the many smaller groups tested, in regard to the types of occu- 1 Address to Biological Section, British Association, 1890. ' 2 Address to the Zoological Section, British Association, 1897.
- t The Child, A. F. Chamberlain, p. 89.
