1879.] onilie History of Games. 127 



its meclireval name of qui fery ? or " who struck ? " — the blindman 

 having to guess by whom he was hit, or with which hand. It was 

 the Greek l-oUahismos, or buffet-game, and carries with it a tragical 

 association in tliose passages in the Gospels which show it turned 

 to mockery by the Roman soldiers : " And when they had blindfolded 

 him . . . they buffeted him . . . saying, Prophesy unto us, thou 

 Christ, w^ho is he that smote thee ? " (Luke xxii. 64 ; Matt. xxvi. 67 ; 

 Mark xiv. 65.) 



Another of the Egyptian pictures plainly represents the game we 

 know by its Italian name of morra, the Latin micatto, 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 natui'C. 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 drinkiug-shop in China as in Italy, and may, perhaps, 

 be reckoned among the items of culture which the Chinese have 

 borrowed 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 diver- 

 sions, " Ludere par impar, equitare in arundine longa." But the child 

 playing 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 

 ancient 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 rj 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 Hindus and Greeks inherited arithmetical ideas and words familiar 

 to their Aryan ancestors. 



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

 modern worlds, let us now look at the ball-j^lay, 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 



