228 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



that accompanied the dance (Italian ballata, French ballade, English 

 ballad). The passion of ball-play begins not with this friendly, grace- 

 ful delivery of the ball into the next hand, but when two hostile 

 players or parties are striving each to take or send it away from the 

 other. Thus, on the one hand, there comes into existence the group 

 of games represented by the Greek harpaston, or seizing-game, where 

 the two sides struggled to carry off the ball. In Brittany this has 

 been played till modern times with the hay-stuffed soule or stm-ball, 

 as big as a football, fought for by two communes, each striving to 

 carry it home over their own border. ICmile Souvestre, in his " Der- 

 niers Bretons," has told the last story of this fierce game in the 

 Ponthivy district how the man who had had his father killed and 

 his own eye knocked out by Francois, surnamed le Souleur, lay in 

 wait for that redoubted champion, and got him down, soule and all, 

 half-way across the boundary stream. The murderous sOule-play had 

 to be put down by authority, as it had been years before in Scotland, 

 where it had given rise to the suggestive proverb, " All is fair at the 

 ball of Scone." The other class of hostile ball-games differs from this 

 in the ball having not to be brought to one's own home, but sent to 

 the goal of the other side. In the Greek epikoinos, or common-ball, 

 the ball was put on the middle line, and each party tried to seize it and 

 throw it over the adversary's goal-line. This game also lasted on into 

 modern Europe, and our proper English name for it is hurling, while 

 football also is a variety of it, the great Roman blown leather ball 

 {follis) being used instead of the small hand-ball, and kicked instead 

 of thrown. Now, as hurling was an ordinary classical game, the an- 

 cients need only have taken a stick to drive the ball instead of using 

 hands or feet, and would thus have arrived at hockey. But Cory don 

 never seems to have thought of borrowing Phillis's crook for the pur- 

 pose it would have so exactly suited. No mention of games like hoc- 

 key appears in the ancient world, and the course of invention which 

 brought them into the modern world is at once unexpected and in- 

 structive. 



The game known to us as polo has been traced by Sir W. Ouseley, 

 in Persia, far back in the Sassanian dynasty, and was at any rate in 

 vogue there before the eighth century. It was played with the long- 

 handled mallet called chuydn, which Persian word came to signify also 

 the game played with it. This is the instrument referred to in the 

 " Thousand and One Nights," and among various earlier passages where 

 it occurs is the legend told by the Persian historian of Darius insult- 

 ing Alexander by sending him a ball and mallet (yu'l ve chuydn) as a 

 hint that he was a boy more fit to play polo than to go to war. "When 

 this tale finds its way to Scotland, in the romance of King Alisaunde, 

 these unknown instruments are replaced by a whipping-top, and Shake- 

 speare has the story in the English guise of a newer period in the 

 scene in " Henry V." : " What treasure, uncle ? " " Tennis-balls, my 



