But in animal play, as indeed in that of human youth, we are perhaps a little apt, in laying stress on the bodily skill and readiness of response to which it so effectually ministers, to forget that it is also a psychological training. In technical phraseology, we are disposed to fix our attention on the acquired co-ordination of act and movement rather than on the correlation of conscious data, which renders possible the skilful performance. And yet, rightly considered, the behaviour itself is simply the outcome of a conscious situation, duly elaborated, and knit together through the association and coalescence of its constituent data. It is a means to the unification of consciousness by bringing into relation scattered and, at first, quasi-independent sensory and emotional elements. Success is only attained through the concentration of attention and effort on that which is the centre of interest and also the focus of endeavour. And this close attention and well-directed effort, which are trained in the playful output of energy, are just the mental qualities which will stand the animal in good stead when the real incidence of life’s struggle comes upon it, when the reward of success is survival and the penalty of failure elimination. For they are not merely physical qualities, though their effects are bodily movements of attack and defence, of active escape, or merely “lying low.” They are essential psychological features of a unified and well-directed conative process. In the fairly abundant play-time of animal life, this unification and direction of conative process can take form under conditions wherein the preliminary failures which accompany all forms of learning do not entail the severe penalty of elimination. If we may so put it, and so apply a deeply instructive parable, Natural Selection says to her more favoured children, in which conscious situations can be developed, “Here are the talents with which I have endowed you; make use of them till I come, as come I shall in due time.” This animal puts them out to usury in play; that animal keeps them laid up in the napkin of inactivity. Then Natural Selection, the austere one, comes; gives the commendation of survival to the animal that had learnt to put its talents to use in the period of preparation, and condemns to elimination that which had not traded with his talents at the bank of play. In animal life, on the perceptual plane, we have the same need for training in little things and seemingly unimportant matters in preparation for the stress and storm which may, nay must, come upon them, that we find in men and women on the higher ethical plane. To those who think that the play of animals is too trifling a thing to affect the question of survival, we would suggest the application, with a necessary difference, of the thought which Miss Edith Simcox puts into the following words: “Does it,” she says, “seem a trifling thing