having been brought by the Oceanic peoples in their wanderings from the Malay Archipelago. Dr. Gill believes that the Polynesians first arrived in the Hervey Islands some two or three hundred years ago, and that their swarming from Savai'i took place some five or six centuries ago.' How and when their ancestors got to the Samoan group is still very problematical. An additional argument in favour of the natives of the Hervey group bringing their kites with them is found in the " Plan of the Winds" as handed down by the ancient priests, which, with slight variations, is known from many other of the Oceanic groups. The number of windholes in this plan exactly corresponds with the points of the mariner's compass. In the olden times great stress was laid on this knowledge for the purpose of fishing, and especially for the long sea voyages which these adventurous navigators undertook from group to group. The Chinese are credited with having invented the mariner's compass long anterior to the Christian era. I should not be surprised if, ultimately, it was found to be the case that the compass, with certain other elements of Chinese culture, was brought to that country by a maritime people who were early merged into the general population of that mixed people, and who have subsequently been forgotten. It was known to the Arabs in mediæval times, and from them, through the crusaders, the knowledge spread over Europe. As Dr. Gill points out, the absence of iron throughout Polynesia would easily account for the loss of the magnet, but the plan of the card was perpetuated.

Thus once more our attention is directed towards Eastern Asia, not only as the headquarters, but also as the place of origin, of the kite. It may yet be shown that it actually originated among the Indonesian stock before the Polynesians had swarmed off from the so-called Malay Archipelago 1 Myths and Songs, p. 167. 2 Ibid., p. 319.

to found new homes in Oceania. There are anthropologists who claim a southern origin for the fine type of the Japanese; possibly these adventurous and skilful seamen, like the Norsemen of Northern Europe, may have formed an aristocracy among the agricultural and settled peoples of Japan and Korea, and brought with them their social organisation and a higher culture. If this be so, it is not improbable that kite-flying was a religious exercise of these people, and the kite may have been a symbol of the soul or spirit of man.

If we grant, and there is to my mind very good reason for so doing, that the kite was a religious symbol of the primitive Indonesian race, we may fairly go one step further and suggest that the kite itself is merely the liberated sail of a canoe. Amongst a seafaring folk this accident must often arise, and the excitement of hauling down a sail that had blown away might very well lead to the process being intentionally repeated on a small scale.

It is tempting to imagine that as the sails of a canoe are virtually the life of a canoe—that is, the source of its movement, the loss of which leaves behind it an inert log at the mercy of the elements-so the kite by analogy may have come to be regarded as the "external soul" or "life-token of the owner. For an elucidation of the remarkable belief that the soul can be located in an extraneous object far removed from the body, the reader is referred to the concluding part of Dr. Frazer's monumental work, The Golden Bough. Mr. Hartland, in his great study of the Legend of Perseus, deals fully with the life-token; he is of opinion that we are "justified in treating the life-token and the external soul as almost always one and the same thing in belief and custom" (p. 30). Granting the truth of the statement that

ii.,

1 J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, a Study in Comparative Religion, 1890, p. 296.

2 E. Sidney Hartland, The Legend of Perseus, a Study of Tradition in Story, Custom, and Belief, 1895, ii., pp. 1-54.

the King of Siam's kite is flown at night by a trusted mandarin, the fact would bear the interpretation that during the hours of darkness and danger the royal soul was peacefully soaring in the calm heavens, far removed from mundane risks.

Problems such as these, which are suggested by the comparative study of toys, have in themselves those very dangers which beset the kites themselves. The string which binds them to the solid earth may snap, and they may be lost in the clouds, or they may fall, as it were, lifeless to the ground.

CHAPTER IX

TOYS AND GAMES: TOPS AND THE TUG-OF-WAR

WE

TOPS

E have seen that the kite has been introduced into Europe from Eastern Asia, but Schlegel believes that the debt has not been all on one side, as, according to him, the West has repaid in the top its debt to the East for the kite.

There are many kinds of tops, but they can be resolved into a few groups: the whipping-top; the top turned by a string wound round the upper end as in the humming-top, in which case there is usually a detachable handle, or by the string enwrapping the lower end as in the usual peg-tops; and lastly the top, or teetotum, spun by being twisted by the hands or fingers.

Every spring, tops appear in our streets with the regularity of the seasonal revivals of Dame Nature herself.

"Tops are in, spin 'em agin;

Tops are out, smuggin' about,"

cried the ragamuffins in Hone's time,' and so they still do. The last phrase has reference to an unwritten code of boylife, that confiscation ("smugging") of tops is allowable when they are "out."

1 W. Hone, The Every-Day Book, i., 1824 (February 15), p. 253.

1

Nares has collected several references which show that tops were at one time owned by the parish or town. In Twelfth Night' we read: "He's a coward and coystril, that will not drink to my niece, till his brains turn o' the toe like the parish top."

Beaumont and Fletcher refer more than once to this strange civic toy.

"I'll hazard

My life upon it, that a boy of twelve

Should scourge him hither like a parish top,
And make him dance before you.

3

And dances like a town-top, and reels and hobbles.'

9 4

Sir W. Blackstone asserts, also, that to sleep like a towntop" was proverbial. Stevens, in his Notes on Shakespeare, states that this is one of the customs now laid aside: a large top was formerly kept in every village, to be whipt in frosty weather, that the peasants might be kept warm by exercise and out of mischief while they could not work." is very improbable that this is the real signification of the curious custom of having a village top. Judging from what we know of other instances of village recreations, it is probable that there is something behind this which has not yet been elucidated.

It

Hone' refers to a top being used in the ritual of the burial of Alleluia in one of the churches in Paris. "According to a story (whether true or false) in one of the churches of Paris, a choir boy used to whip a top marked with Alleluia, written in gold letters, from one end of the choir to the other." 1 R. Nares, Glossary, "Parish Top."

Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act i., Scene 3.

3 Beaumont and Fletcher, Thierry and Theod., Act ii., Scene 4. Ibid., Night Walker, Act i., Scene 4.

5 W. Hone, The Every-Day Book, i., 1824 (February 2), p. 199.