THE HISTORY OF GAMES. 231 



ings, was played with a stool, which one protected by striking away 

 with his hands the hall which another bowled at it ; the in-player was 

 out if the stool was hit, or he might be caught out, so that here is evi- 

 dently part of the origin of cricket, in which the present stumps seem 

 to represent the stool. In club-ball a ball was bowled and hit with a 

 club ; and a game called cat-and-dog was played in Scotland two cen- 

 turies ago, where players protected not wickets but holes from the 

 wooden cat pitched at them, getting runs when they hit it. We have 

 here the simple elements from which the complex modern cricket was 

 developed. Lastly, among the obscure accounts of ancient ball-play, 

 it is not easy to make out that the ball was ever sent against an oppo- 

 site wall for the other player to take it at the bound and return it. 

 Such a game, particularly suited to soldiers shut up in castle-yards, 

 became popular about the fourteenth century under the name of pila 

 palmaria, or Jew de paulme, which name indicates its original mode of 

 striking with the palm of the hand, as in Jives. It was an improve- 

 ment to protect the hand with a glove, such as may still be seen in 

 the ball-play of Basque cities, as at Bayonne. Sometimes a battledoor 

 faced with parchment was used, as witness the story of the man who 

 declared he had played with a battledoor that had on it fragments of 

 the lost decades of Livy. But it was the racket that made possible 

 the " cutting " and " boasting " of the mediaeval tennis-court, with its 

 elaborate scoring by " chases." No doubt it was the real courtyard 

 of the chateau, with its penthouses, galleries, and grated windows, 

 that furnished the tennis-court with the models for its quaintly artifi- 

 cial grilles and lunes so eruditely discussed in Mr. Julian Marshall's 

 "Annals of Tennis." A few enthusiastic amateurs still delight in the 

 noble and costly game, but the many have reason to be grateful for 

 lawn-tennis out of doors, though it be but a mild version of the 

 great game, to which it stands as hockey to polo or as draughts to 

 chess. 



Turning now to the principal groups of sedentary games, I may 

 refer to the evidence I have brought forward elsewhere,* that the use 

 of lots or dice for gambling arose out of an earlier serious use of such 

 instruments for magical divination. The two conceptions, indeed, 

 pass into one another. The magician draws lots to learn the future, 

 and the gambler to decide the future, so that the difference between 

 them is that between " will " and " shall." But the two-faced lot that 

 can only fall head or tail can only give a simple yes or no, which is 

 often too simple for either the diviner or the gambler. So we find 

 African negroes divining with a number of cowries thrown together 

 to see how many fall up and how many down ; and this, too, is the 

 Chinese method of solemn lot-casting in the temple, when the falling 

 of the spoon-like wooden lots, so many up and so many down, fur- 

 nishes an intricate result which is to be interpreted by means of the 



* " Primitive Culture," chap. iii. 



