THE HISTORY OF GAMES. zz 7 



eiation in those passages in the Gospels which show it turned to mock- 

 ery by the Roman soldiers: "And when they had blindfolded him 

 .... they buffeted him .... saying, Prophesy unto us, Christ, Who 

 is he that smote thee?" (Luke xxii. 64 ; Matt. xxvi. 67 ; Markxiv. 65). 



Another of the Egyptian pictures plainly represents the game we 

 know by its Italian name of morra, the Latin micatio, or flashing of 

 the fingers, which has thus lasted on in the Mediterranean districts 

 over three thousand years, handed down through a hundred successive 

 generations who did not improve it, for from the first it was perfect 

 in its fitting into one little niche in human nature. It is the game of 

 guessing addition, the players both at once throwing out fingers and 

 in the same moment shouting their guesses at the total. Morra is the 

 pastime of the drinking-shop in China as in Italy, and may, perhaps, 

 be reckoned among the items of culture which the Chinese have bor- 

 rowed from the Western barbarians. Though so ancient, morra has in 

 it no touch of prehistoric rudeness, but must owe its origin to a period 

 when arithmetic had risen quite above the savage level. The same is 

 true of the other old arithmetical game, odd-and-even, which the poet 

 couples with riding on a stick as the most childish of diversions, 

 "Ludere>r irrypar, equitare in arundine longa." But the child play- 

 ing it must be of a civilized nation, not of a low barbaric tribe, where 

 no one would think of classing numbers into the odd-and-even series, 

 so that Europeans have even had to furnish their languages with 

 words for these ideas. I asked myself the question whether the an- 

 cient Aryans distinguished odd from even, and curiously enough found 

 that an answer had been preserved by the unbroken tradition not of 

 Greek arithmeticians, but of boys at play. A scholiast on the Ploutos 

 of Aristophanes, where the game is mentioned, happens to remark that 

 it was also known as %vya ?/ a^vya, "yokes or not-yokes." Now, this 

 matches so closely in form and sense with the Sanskrit terms for even 

 and odd numbers, yuj and ayuj, as to be fair evidence that both Hin- 

 doos and Greeks inherited arithmetical ideas and words familiar to 

 their Aryan ancestors. 



Following up the clews that join the play-life of the ancient and 

 modern worlds, let us now look at the ball-play, which has always 

 held its place among sports. Beyond mere tossing and catching, the 

 simplest kind of ball-play is where a ring of players send the ball 

 from hand to hand. This gentle pastime has its well-marked place 

 in history. Thus the ancient Greeks, whose secret of life was to do 

 even trivial things with artistic perfection, delighted in the game of 

 Nausikaa, and on their vases is painted many a scene where ball- 

 play, dance, and song unite in one graceful sport. The ball-dance 

 is now scarcely to be found but as an out-of-the-way relic of old 

 custom ; yet it has left curious traces in European languages, where 

 the ball (Low Latin ballet) has given its name to the dance it went with 

 (Italian ballare, hallo, French hal, English ball) and even to the song 



