128 Mr. E. B. Tylor [March 14, 



tlie hall (Low Latin hallo) has given its name to the dance it went with 

 (Italian hollar e, hallo, French hoi, English hall), and even to the song 

 that accompanied the dance (Italian hollato, French hallade, English 

 hallad). 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 sim-ball, 

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

 carry it home over their own border. Emile Souvestre, in his 

 ' Derniers 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 Fran9ois, 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 ancients need only have taken a stick to 

 drive the ball instead of using hands or feet, and would thus have 

 arrived at hockey. But Corydon never seems to have thought of 

 borrowing Phillis's crook for the purpose it would have so exactly 

 suited. No mention of games like hockey ajjpears in the ancient 

 world, and the course of invention which brought them into the modern 

 world is at once unexj^ected and instructive. 



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 chugdn, 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 insulting Alexander by sending him a ball and mallet 

 [gut VG chugdn) as a hint that he was a boy more fit to play jiolo 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 Shakspere has the story in the English 

 guise of a newer period in the scene in Henry V. : " What treasure. 



