September, 19 13 



AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 



329 



Richard Pischel, author of 

 "The Home of the Puppet 

 Play," tells us that in an- 

 cient India, puppets or dolls 

 were made out of wool, 

 wood, buffalo horn, and 

 that these playthings were 

 quite as popular long ago 

 with the girls of that coun- 



ored beads have been at- 

 tached, probably to repre- 

 sent hair. 



In the Vatican Museum, 

 among the Roman remains 

 found in the catacombs, are 

 seen ivory dolls with mov- 

 able limbs. In Ava Roma 

 lmmortalis, Marion Craw- 



caused his own misfortune 

 and then lamented over it 

 that he was crying after 

 German baby doll breaking his own doll. In 



India even grown-up people enjoyed playing wilh puppets 



try as they are with our girls ford speaks of ancient Ro- 



at the present day. The man dolls made of rags and 



broken doll was then the stuffed with waste from 



cause of as many tears as their mothers' spindles and 



would be shed nowadays; looms. He also tells of 



indeed, it was proverbially effigies of bulrushes which 



said of any one who had the Pontiffs and Vestals 



came to throw into the Ti- 

 ber from the Sublician 

 Bridge on the Ides of May. 

 The ruins of Pompeii have German dolls 



given us also many pathetic and interesting little remains 



Vatsya Yama, in his treatise on love, advises not only boys, of happy childhood from ancient and civilized times. 



but also young men, to "join the girls and young 

 women in their games with puppets as a means of 

 gaining their affections." 



It is recorded in an ancient book of India that 

 Parvati, wife of the God Siva, made herself so 

 beautiful a doll that she thought it necessary to 

 conceal it from her husband, so one fine day car- 

 ried it away to the Malaya Mountain and hid it 

 away in a sheltered nook. It occupied so large a 

 place in her affections that she visited it every day 

 and amused herself by dressing and undressing it 

 and fashioning new ornaments and garments for it. 



Siva, after the manner of human husbands, be- 

 came suspicious of her long absences, and stole 

 after her one day and saw the doll. It was 

 so beautiful he fell in love with it and en- 

 dowed it with life. 



The oldest dolls in the world to-day are 

 those which have been found in the tombs 

 of Egyptian children, dating as far back as 

 4,000 years ago. They are funny little 

 manikins which a kindergarten child or 

 public school girl of to-day would uncon- 

 sciously sniff at, but they command the re- 

 spect of the student of sociology, as being 

 the really and truly doll babies which the 



Singhalese doll 



The question has been raised whether the Mos- 

 lem child of olden times played with a headless 

 doll or not, Mohammed having forbidden the 

 reproduction of the human features in any form. 

 That the dolls of Egypt to-day have heads, I can 

 speak with certainty, having seen many in Egypt 

 and having in my collection several specimens, all 

 with heads. A little one from up the Nile was 

 literally snatched from the hands of a Fellapheen 

 child. It is a veritable vampire, fashioned after 

 Kipling's description, "A rag, a bone and a hank 

 of hair." Another, a Soudanese, has a piece of 

 bamboo for a body, with knobs of Nile mud stuck 

 on the extremities for head and feet. Its dress 

 would entitle it to a place among those who 

 live the simple life, as there is absolutely 

 nothing superfluous about it. This and the 

 three tribal marks on each cheek make it 

 typical of its class. 



The earliest dolls mentioned in transla- 

 tions of Chinese history are credited with 

 enormous antiquity and are invariably 

 made to represent Emperors, Empresses 

 and other members of the royal families. 

 They were used to illustrate manners and 

 customs of the country and to teach history, 



little brown-skinned children of Pharoah's land loved and and they were Chinese to the backbone; they were not then 

 cuddled, probably 

 spanked. There is a 

 great variety of them, 

 as to material, form 

 and decorations. 

 Clothing was thought 

 to be superfluous, or 

 the material of which 

 it was made has van- 

 ished with the pass- 

 ing years, for there is 

 nothing that might, 

 even by a vivid imag- 

 ination, be thought to 

 represent a costume. 

 These small dolls are 

 made of ivory, clay, 

 wood and bron/e. 

 One group has curi- 

 ous heads of clay, to 

 which strings of col- 



A row of modern German dolls 



nor are their dolls 

 now "made in Ger- 

 many" and dressed in 

 celestial garments. 

 The tilt-up doll, the 

 origin of which is gen- 

 erally credited to 

 Germany, was born in 

 the Orient, where it is 

 still very much at 

 home. Stewart Culm, 

 in his researches in 

 the direction of toys 

 and games has 

 brought out the fact 

 that probably these 

 dolls were images of 

 Buddha, though he 

 thinks it possible that 

 they may have had a 

 still greater antiquity 



