arts, so they reproduce, in what are at once sports and little children's lessons, early stages in the history of childlike tribes of mankind. English children delighting in the imitations of cries of animals and so forth, and New Zealanders playing their favourite game of imitating in chorus the saw hissing, the adze chipping, the musket roaring, and the other instruments making their proper noises, are alike showing at its source the imitative element so important in the formation of language.1 When we look into the early development of the art of counting, and see the evidence of tribe after tribe having obtained numerals through the primitive stage of counting on their fingers, we find a certain ethnographic interest in the games which teach this earliest numeration. The New Zealand game of 'ti' is described as played by counting on the fingers, a number being called by one player, and he having instantly to touch the proper finger; while in the Samoan game one player holds out so many fingers, and his opponent must do the same instantly or lose a point. These may be native Polynesian games, or they may be our own children's games borrowed. In the English nursery the child learns to say how many fingers the nurse shows, and the appointed formula of the game is 'Buck, Buck, how many horns do I hold up?' The game of one holding up fingers and the others holding up fingers to match is mentioned in Strutt. We may see small schoolboys in the lanes playing at the guessing-game, where one gets on another's back and holds up fingers, the other must guess how many. It is interesting to notice the wide distribution and long permanence of these trifles in history when we read the following passage from Petronius Arbiter, written in the time of Nero :'Trimalchio, not to seem moved by the loss, kissed the boy and bade him get up on his back. Without delay the

1 Polack, 'New Zealanders,' vol. ii. p. 171.

2 Polack, ibid.; Wilkes, 'U.S. Exp.' vol. i. p. 194. See the account of the game of liagi in Mariner, 'Tonga Is.' vol. ii. p. 339; and Yate, 'New Zealand,' p. 113.

boy climbed on horseback on him, and slapped him on the shoulders with his hand, laughing and calling out 'bucca, bucca, quot sunt hic?'1 The simple counting-games played with the fingers must not be confounded with the addition-game, where each player throws out a hand, and the sum of all the fingers shown has to be called, the successful caller scoring a point; each should call the total before he sees his adversary's hand, so that the skill lies especially in shrewd guessing. This game affords endless amusement to Southern Europe, where it is known in Italian as 'morra,' and in French as 'mourre,' and it is popular in China under the name of ts'ai mei, or 'guess how many!' many!' So peculiar a game would hardly have been invented twice over in Europe and Asia, and as the Chinese term does not appear to be ancient, we may take it as likely that the Portuguese merchants introduced the game into China, as they certainly did into Japan. The ancient Egyptians, as their sculptures show, used to play at some kind of finger-game, and the Romans had their finger-flashing, 'micare digitis,' at which butchers used to gamble with their customers for bits of meat. is not clear whether these were morra or games.2

It

some other

When Scotch lads, playing at the game of 'tappietousie,' take one another by the forelock and say, 'Will ye be my man?'3 they know nothing of the old symbolic manner of receiving a bondman which they are keeping up in survival. The wooden drill for making fire by friction, which so many rude or ancient races are known to have used as their common household instrument, and which lasts on among the modern Hindus as the time-honoured sacred means of lighting the pure sacrificial flame, has been

1 Petron. Arbitri Satiræ rec. Büchler, p. 64 (other readings are bucco or bucco).

2 Compare Davis, 'Chinese,' vol. i. p. 317; Wilkinson, Ancient Egyptians, vol. i. p. 188; Facciolati, Lexicon, s. v. 'micare'; &c. 3 Jamieson, 'Dict. of Scottish Lang.' s. v.

found surviving in Switzerland as a toy among the children, who made fire with it in sport, much as Esquimaux would have done in earnest. In Gothland it is on record that the ancient sacrifice of the wild boar has actually been carried on into modern time in sportive imitation, by lads in masquerading clothes with their faces blackened and painted, while the victim was personated by a boy rolled up in furs and placed upon a seat, with a tuft of pointed straws in his mouth to imitate the bristles of the boar.2 One innocent little child's sport of our own time is strangely mixed up with an ugly story of about a thousand years ago. The game in question is thus played in France:-The children stand in a ring, one lights a spill of paper and passes it on to the next, saying, 'petit bonhomme vit encore,' and so on round the ring, each saying the words and passing on the flame as quickly as may be, for the one in whose hands the spill goes out has to pay a forfeit, and it is then proclaimed that petit bonhomme est mort.' Grimm mentions a similar game in Germany, played with a burning stick, and Halliwell gives the nursery rhyme which is said with it when it is played in England :—

'Jack's alive and in very good health,

If he dies in your hand you must look to yourself.'

Now, as all readers of Church history know, it used to be a favourite engine of controversy for the adherents of an established faith to accuse heretical sects of celebrating hideous orgies as the mysteries of their religion. The Pagans told these stories of the Jews, the Jews told them of the Christians, and Christians themselves reached a bad eminence in the art of slandering religious opponents whose moral life often seems in fact to have been exceptionally pure. The Manichæans were an especial mark for such aspersions, which were passed on to a sect considered as their successors-the Paulicians, whose name reappears in

་

1 Early History of Mankind,' p. 244, &c.; Grimm, 'Deutsche Myth.,' p. 573. 2 Grimm, ibid., p. 1200.

the middle ages, in connexion with the Cathari. To these latter, apparently from an expression in one of their religious formulas, was given the name of Boni Homines, which became a recognized term for the Albigenses. It is clear that the early Paulicians excited the anger of the orthodox by objecting to sacred images, and calling those who venerated them idolaters; and about A.D. 700, John of Osun, Patriarch of Armenia, wrote a diatribe against the sect, urging accusations of the regular anti-Manichæan type, but with a peculiar feature which brings his statement into the present singular connexion. He declares that they blasphemously call the orthodox 'image-worshippers;' that they themselves worship the sun; that, moreover, they mix wheaten flour with the blood of infants and therewith celebrate their communion, and when they have slain by the worst of deaths a boy, the first-born of his mother, thrown from hand to hand among them by turns, they venerate him in whose hand the child expires, as having attained to the first dignity of the sect.' To explain the correspondence of these atrocious details with the nursery sport, it is perhaps the most likely supposition, not that the game of 'Petit Bonhomme' keeps up a recollection of a legend of the Boni Homines, but that the game was known to the children of the eighth century much as it is now, and that the Armenian Patriarch simply accused the Paulicians of playing at it with live babes.1

1 Halliwell, 'Popular Rhymes,' p. 112; Grimm, 'D. M.' p. 812. Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. iii. p. 106. Johannis Philosophi Ozniensis Opera (Aucher), Venice, 1834, pp. 78-89. 'Infantium sanguini similam commiscentes illegitimam communionem deglutiunt; quo pacto porcorum suos fœtus immaniter vescentium exsuperant edacitatem. Quique illorum cadavera super tecti culmen celantes, ac sursum oculis in cœlum defixis respicientes, jurant alieno verbo ac sensu: Altissimus novit. Solem vero deprecari volentes, ajunt: Solicule, Lucicule; atque aëreos, vagosque dæmones clam invocant, juxta Manichæorum Simonisque incantatoris errores. Similiter et primum parientis fœminæ puerum de manu in manum inter eos invicem projectum, quum pessimâ morte occiderint, illum, in cujus manu exspiraverit puer, ad primam sectæ dignitatem provectum venerantur; atque per utriusque nomen audent insane jurare; Juro, dicunt, per unigenitum filium : et iterum: Testem habeo tibi gloriam ejus, in cujus manum unigenitus filius

It may be possible to trace another interesting group of sports as survivals from a branch of savage philosophy, once of high rank though now fallen into merited decay. Games of chance correspond so closely with arts of divination belonging already to savage culture, that there is force in applying to several such games the rule that the serious practice comes first, and in time may dwindle to the sportive survival. To a modern educated man, drawing lots or tossing up a coin is an appeal to chance, that is, to ignorance; it is committing the decision of a question to a mechanical process, itself in no way unnatural or even extraordinary, but merely so difficult to follow that no one can say beforehand what will come of it. But we also know that this scientific doctrine of chance is not that of early civilization, which has little in common with the mathematician's theory of probabilities, but much in common with such sacred divination as the choice of Matthias by lot as a twelfth apostle, or, in a later age, the Moravian Brethren's rite of choosing wives for their young men by casting lots with prayer. It was to no blind chance that the Maoris looked when they divined by throwing up lots to find a thief among a suspected company; or the Guinea negroes when they went to the fetish-priest, who shuffled his bundle of little strips of leather and gave his sacred omen.2 The crowd with uplifted hands pray to the gods, when the heroes cast lots in the cap of Atreides Agamemnon, to know who shall go forth to do battle with Hektor and help the wellgreaved Greeks. With prayer to the gods, and looking up to heaven, the German priest or father, as Tacitus relates, drew three lots from among the marked fruit-tree twigs scattered on a pure white garment, and interpreted the

spiritum suum tradidit Contra hos [the orthodox] audacter evomere præsumunt impietatis suæ bilem, atque insanientes, ex mali spiritus blasphemiâ, Sculpticolas vocant.'

1 Polack, vol. i. p. 270.

2 Bosman, 'Guinese Kust,' letter x.; Eng. Trans. in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 399.

3 Homer. Iliad. vii. 171; Pindar. Pyth. iv. 338.