WHALES AND THEIR NEIGHBORS. 237 



hour in learning it, we should perhaps have known whether it was the 

 Chinese or the Malay game, or what it was ; and this might have been 

 the very clew, lost to native memory, to the connection of the Polyne- 

 sians with a higher Asiatic culture in ages before a European ship had 

 come within their coral reefs. 



It remains to call attention to a point which this research into the 

 development of games brings strongly into view. In the study of 

 civilization, as of so many other branches of natural history, a theory 

 of gradual evolution proves itself a trustworthy guide. But it will 

 not do to assume that culture must always come on by regular, unvary- 

 ing progress. That, on the contrary, the lines of change may be ex- 

 tremely circuitous, the history of games affords instructive proofs. 

 Looking over a playground wall at a game of hockey, one might easily 

 fancy the simple line of improvement to have been that the modern 

 schoolboy took to using a curved stick to drive the ball with, instead 

 of hurling it with his hands as he would have done if he had been a 

 young Athenian of b. c. 500. But now it appears that the line of 

 progress was by no means so simple and straight, if we have to go 

 round by Persia, and bring in the game of polo as an intermediate 

 stage. If, comparing Greek draughts and English draughts, we were 

 to jump to the conclusion that the one was simply a further develop- 

 ment of the other, this would be wrong, for the real course appears to 

 have been that some old draught-game rose into chess, and then again 

 a lowered form of chess came down to become a new game of draughts. 

 We may depend upon it that the great world-game of evolution is not 

 played only by pawns moving straight on, one square before another, 

 but that long-stretching moves of pieces in all directions bring on new 

 situations, not readily foreseen by minds that find it hard to see six 

 moves ahead upon a chess-board. Fortnightly Review. 







WHALES AND THEIE NEIGHBORS. 



By Dr. ANDREW WILSON. 



THE medical student, who, in answer to an examiner anxious to 

 ascertain the exact amount of the lad's knowledge concerning 

 fishes, replied that " he knew them all from the limpet to the whale," 

 must indeed be credited with a larger share of candor than of zoologi- 

 cal science. The limpet is a shell " fish " by courtesy at the best, but 

 the whale, public opinion notwithstanding, is not a fish in any sense 

 of the term. The most that can be said of the whale in this respect 

 is that it is fish-like ; and, admitting that appearances in zoological 

 study are as deceptive as in ordinary existence, it behooves us to be 

 cautious in accepting outward resemblances as indicative of real and 



