This theory of race recapitulation as applied to the succeeding stages of boyhood may be somewhat more poetic than scientific.  Genetically he does those things for which at the time he has the requisite muscular and nervous equipment, but the growth of this equipment gives him a series of interests and expressions that run in striking parallel to primitive life.  If the enveloping society is highly civilized and artificial, much of his primitive desire may be cruelly smothered or too hastily refined or forced into a criminal course.  But memory, experience, observation, and experiment force one to note that the parallel does exist and that it is vigorously and copiously attested by the boy’s likes and deeds.  At the same time the theory is to be used suggestively rather than dogmatically, and the leader of boys will not imagine that to reproduce the primitive life is the goal of his endeavor.  It is by the recognition of primitive traits and by connecting with them as they emerge that the guide of boyhood may secure an intelligent and well-supported advance.

Such an approach favors a sympathetic understanding of the boy.  To behold in him a rough summary of the past, and to be able to capitalize for good the successive instincts as they appear, is to accomplish a fine piece of missionary work without leaving home.  Africa and Borneo and Alaska come to you.  The fire-worshiper of ancient times, the fierce tribesman, the savage hunter and fisher, the religion-making nomad, the daring pirate, the bedecked barbarian, the elemental fighter with nature and fellow and rival of every kind, the master of the world in making—­comes before you in dramatic and often pathetic array in the unfolding life of the ordinary boy.

Our topmost civilization, although sustained and repleted by this original stuff, takes all too little account of these elemental traits.  In the growing boy the ascending races are piled one on top of another.  In him you get a longitudinal section of human nature since its beginning.  He is an abridged volume on ethnology; and because he is on the way up and elected to rule, it is more of a mistake to neglect him than it is to neglect any of those races that have suffered a long-continued arrest at some point along the way.  Of course anyone expecting to note by day and hour the initial emergence of this or that particular trait of primitive man will be disappointed.  The thing for the friend of the boy to know is that in him the deep-set habits which made the human body the instrument it is, the old propensities of savage life are voices of the past, muffled, perhaps, but very deep and insistent, calling him to do the things which for ages were done and to make full trial of the physique which modern civilization threatens with disuse or perversion.

[Illustration:  Mighty Hunters]

[Illustration:  The lure of the water]