1879.] on the History of Games. 131 



evidently part of the origin of cricket, in wliicli tlic present stumps 

 seem to rcju'esent the stool. In clnh-hall a ball was bowled and hit 

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

 two centuries 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 

 opposite wall for the other players 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 jeii de pauhne, 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, as such may still be seen in the 

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

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

 declared he had played with a battledore 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 arti- 

 ficial grilles and lunes so eruditely discussed in Mr. Julian Mar- 

 shall'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, furnishes an 

 intricate result which is to be interpreted by means of the book of 

 mystic diagrams. When this combination of a number of two-faced 

 lots is used by gamblers, this, perhaps, represents the earlier stage of 

 gaming, which may have led up to the invention of dice, in which the 

 purpose of variety is so much more neatly and easily attained. The 



* ' Primitive Culture,' chap. iii. 



