THE PLAY OF ANIMALS. 81 
course, some care must be taken to distinguish genuine sham- 
fights from real fights, and it must be allowed that as 
among boys, so among animals, what begins in fun may 
end in deadly earnest. Brehm, in describing two young 
gluttons, says nothing could be more playful; they are 
almost never at rest for a minute; they fight in fun all day, 
but every now and then the note of earnest is struck. 
Just on the border-line are some difficult cases, such as the 
combats of male spiders, who may fight for days without giving 
or receiving a wound, or the tilts of the fighting ruffs, who 
fight straight on for hours without obvious cause, about a 
fly, a beetle, a standing-place, anything or nothing. 
Perhaps you notice the quaint way in which these two 
last-mentioned combats suggest the duelling of the French 
and German nations respectively. The spiders’ duels, 
wherein no one is hurt, are like those of French politicians ; 
those of the ruffs, in which there are at least hard blows, 
suggest the duels of German students, in which the merest 
pretext—the ejaculation Dummer Junge —brings the steel out. 
Of much interest, considering the level at which they 
occur, are the sham-fights of the ants. Near the beginning 
of the century, Huber related that on fine days the meadow- 
ants collect outside the hill, and hold sports, especially of a 
wrestling and gymnastic sort. For a long time this story 
was rather scoffed at, but in 1874 Forel saw the same sight, 
confessing at the same time that he should not have believed 
it unless he had seen. The ants behaved like a crowd of 
schoolboys riotous with fun—scrambling, wrestling, jump- 
ing, and fighting. “ Yet all,” he said, “ was without anger and 
without any squirting of poison; it was plainly a friendly 
tournament.” Fun was uppermost, but it might at the same 
time have its use as an exercise or drill for these combative 
creatures, 
Social Plays. 
The sham-fight is really one of a large group of plays 
of which the characteristic note is rivalry, provided always 
that we draw the line whenever the rivalry has serious 
reference to any material object of desire. There is no 
doubt that the competitive element gives zest to animal 
