implements furnish children at once play and education; the North American warrior made his boy a little bow and arrow as soon as he could draw it, and the young South Sea Islander learnt by throwing a reed at a rolling ring how in after-life to hurl his spear. It is curious to see that when growing civilization has cast aside the practical use of some ancient contrivance, it may still survive as a toy, as where Swiss children to this day play at making fire by the old-world plan of drilling one piece of wood into another; and in our country lanes the children play with bows and arrows and slings, the serious weapons of their forefathers.

It is not quite easy to say whether man in a low savage state ever goes beyond these practical sports, and invents games of mere play. But higher up in civilization, such games are known from very ancient times. A trifling game, if it exactly takes hold of the playful mind, may last on in the world almost for ever. The ancient Egyptians, as their old paintings show, used to play our childish game of hotcockles, where the blind-man who stoops down has to guess who thumped him on the back. These Egyptians played also the game of guessing the sum of the fingers held up by the two players, which is still popular in China, and in Italy, where one hears it half the night through with shouts of "three!" 66 seven! "five!

mora!"; it is a pity we have not this as a children's game in England, for it trains a sharp eye and a quick hand. While some of our games, such as hoops and whipping-tops, have gone on in the Old World for thousands of years, others are modern importations; thus it was only about Stuart times that English children learnt from the Chinese, or some other nation in the far East, the art of flying kites. Or modern sports may be late improvements

on old ones; the split shank-bones fastened under the shoes for going on the ice delighted the London 'prentices for centuries before they were displaced by steel skates. How a game may sometimes go on for ages unchanged, and then suddenly turn into a higher form, is curiously seen in the game of ball. The ancients tossed and caught balls like children now, and a famous Greek and Roman lad's game was common ball," where there were two sides, and each tried to get the ball and throw it to the opposite goal. This is still played in a few country-places in England; its proper name is "hurling," and football with the great leather ball is a variety of it. The ancients never seem to have used a stick or bat in their ball-play. But some 1,000 or 1,500 years ago the Persians began to play ball on horseback, which of course could only be done with a long stick, mallet, or racket; in this way there came into existence the fine sport of chaugan, which has lasted ever since in the East, and lately established itself in England under the name of polo. When once the club or racket had been invented for horseback, it was easy to use it on foot, and thus in the middle ages there began the whole set of games in which balls are hit with bats, such as pall-mall and croquet, tennis, hockey and golf, rounders and cricket.

Indoor games, too, have their curious history. Throwing lots or dice is far too ancient for any record to remain of its beginning, and the very draught-boards and men which the old Egyptians used to play on are still to be seen. The Greeks and Romans were draught-players, but their games were not like our modern game of draughts. On the other hand our merells or morris belongs to an old classical group of games, and Ovid alludes to the childish game of tit-tat-to. These games are played in China as well, and it is not known at which end of the earth they were first devised. The great

invention in intellectual games may have been made a thousand years or so ago, when some Hindu, whose name is lost, set to work upon the old draught-board and men, and developed out of them a war-game, where on each side a king and his general, with elephants, chariots, and cavalry, and the foot-soldiers in front, met in battle array. This was the earliest chess, which with some little change passed into the modern European chess that still holds pre-eminence among sports, taxing the mind to its utmost stretch of foresight and combination. Our modern draughts is a sort of simplified chess, where the pieces are all pawns till they get across the board and become queens. The story in the history-books that cards were invented in France to amuse Charles VI. is a fiction, for they were known in the East centuries earlier. But at any rate the Europeans make with them combinations of skill and chance which excel anything contrived by their Asiatic inventors. Games which exercise either body or mind have been of high value in civilization as trainers of man's faculties. Games of pure chance played for money stand on quite a different footing; they have been from the first a delusion and a curse. In our own time, there is perhaps no more pitiable sign of the slowness with which scientific ideas spread, than to hear the well-dressed crowds round the gaming-table at Monaco talking about runs of luck, and fancying that it makes a difference whether one backs the black or the red. This goes on although schoolboys are now taught the real doctrine of chances, and how to reckon the fixed percentage of each week's stakes that will be raked in by the croupier, and not come back.

CHAPTER XIII.

SCIENCE.

Science, 309-Counting and Arithmetic, 310-Measuring and Weighing, 316-Geometry, 318-Algebra, 322-Physics, 323-Chemistry, 328-Biology, 329-Astronomy, 332-Geography and Geology, 335 -Methods of Reasoning, 336-Magic, 338.

SCIENCE is exact, regular, arranged knowledge. Of common knowledge savages and barbarians have a vast deal, indeed the struggle of life could not be carried on without it. The rude man knows much of the properties of matter, how fire burns and water soaks, the heavy sinks and the light floats, what stone will serve for the hatchet and what wood for its handle, which plants are food and which are poison, what are the habits of the animals that he hunts or that may fall upon him. He has notions how to cure, and much better notions how to kill. In a rude way he is a physicist in making fire, a chemist in cooking, a surgeon in binding up wounds, a geographer in knowing his rivers and mountains, a mathematician in counting on his fingers. All this is knowledge, and it was on these foundations that science proper began to be built up, when the art of writing had come in and society had entered on the civilized stage. We have to trace here in outline the rise and progress of

science.

And as it has been especially through counting and measuring that scientific methods have come into use, the first thing to do is to examine how men learnt to count and measure.

Even those who cannot talk can count, as was well shown by the deaf-and-dumb lad Massieu, who wrote down among the recollections of his childhood before the Abbé Sicard educated him, "I knew the numbers before my instruction; my fingers had taught me them." We ourselves as children began arithmetic on our fingers and now and then take to them still, so that there is no difficulty in understanding how a savage whose language has no word for a number above three will manage to reckon perhaps a list of fifteen killed and wounded, how he will check off one finger for each man, and at last hold up his hand three times to show the result. The next question is, how numeral words came to be invented. This is answered by many languages, which show in the plainest way how counting on fingers and toes led to making numerals. When a Zulu wants to express the number six, he says tatisitupa, which means "taking the thumb;" this signifies that the speaker has counted all the fingers of his left hand, and begun with the thumb of the right. When he comes to seven, for instance when he has to express that his master bought seven oxen, he will say u kombile, that is, "he pointed"; this signifies that in counting he had come to the pointing-finger or forefinger. In this way the words "hand," "foot," "man," have in various parts of the world become numerals. An example how they are worked may be taken from the language of the Tamanacs of the Orinoco; here the term for five means "whole hand," six is "one of the other hand," and so on up to ten or "both hands"; then "one to the foot" is eleven, and so on to "whole foot" or fifteen, "one to the other