member that all old Greek life-except in rare cases, such as that of Elis, of which we know nothing was distinctly town life; and so, naturally, Greek schooling was day-schooling, from which the children returned to the care of their parents. To hand over boys, far less girls, to the charge of a boardingschool, was perfectly unknown, and would no doubt have been gravely censured. Orphans were placed under the care of their nearest male relative, even when their education was provided (as it was in some cases) by the State. Again, as regards the age of going to school, it would naturally be early, seeing that the day-schools may well include infants of tender age, and that in Greek households neither father nor mother was often able or disposed to undertake the education of the children. Indeed, we find it universal that even the knowl edge of the letters and reading were obtained from a schoolmaster. All these circumstances would point to an early beginning of Greek school life; whereas, on the other hand, the small number of subjects required those days, the absence from the programme of various languages, of most exact sciences, and of general history and geography, made it unnecessary to begin so early, or work so hard, as our unfortunate children have to do. Above all, there was no competi tive examinations, except in athletics and music. The Greeks never thought of promoting a man for "dead knowledge," but for his living grasp of science or of life.

Owing to these causes, we find the theorists discussing, as they now do, the expediency of waiting till the age of seven before beginning serious education: some advising it, others recommending easy and half-playing lessons from an earlier period. And then, as now, we find the same curious silence on the really important fact that the exact number of years a child has lived is nothing to the point in question; and that while one child may be too young at seven to commence work, many more may be distinctively too old.

At all events, we may assume in parents the same varieties of over-anxiety, of over-indulgence, of nervousness, and of carelessness, about their children; and so it doubtless came to pass that there was in many cases a gap between infancy and school life which was spent in playing and doing mischief. This may be fairly inferred, not only from such anecdotes as that of Alcibiades playing with his fellows in the street, evidently without the protection of any pedagogue, but also from the large nomen

clature of boys' games preserved to us in the glossaries of later grammarians.

These games are quite distinct from the regular exercises in the palæstra. We have only general descriptions of them, and these either by Greek scholiasts or by modern philologists. But in spite of the sad want of practical knowledge of games shown by both, the instincts of boyhood are so uniform that we can often frame a very distinct idea of the sort of amusement popular among Greek children. For young boys, games can hardly consist of anything else than either the practicing of some bodily dexterity, such as hopping on one foot higher or longer than is easy, or throwing farther with a stone; or else some imitation of war, such as snowballing, or pulling a rope across a line, or pursuing under fixed conditions; or lastly, the practice of some mechanical ingenuity, such as whipping the top or shooting with marbles. So far as climate or mechanical inventions have not altered our little boys' games, we find all these principles represented in Greek games. There was the hobby or cock horse (kálamon, parabênai); standing or hopping on one leg (askóliázein), which, as the word askos implies, was attempted on a skin bottle filled with liquid and greased; blindman's buff (chalke muia, literally "brazen fly "), in which the boy cried, "I am hunting a brazen fly," and the rest answered, "You will not catch it"; games of hide-and-seek, of taking and releasing prisoners, of fool in the middle, of playing at king: in fact there is probably no simple child's game now known which was not then in use.

A few more details may, however, be interesting. There was a game called kyndalismós [Drive the peg], in which the kyndalon was a peg of wood with a heavy end sharpened, which boys sought to strike into a softened place in the earth so that it stood upright and knocked out the peg of a rival. This reminds us of the peg-top splitting which still goes on in our streets. Another, called ostrakinda, consisted of tossing an oyster shell in the air, of which one side was blackened or moistened and called night, the other, day, or sun and rain. The boys were divided into two sides with these names; and according as their side of the shell turned up, they pursued and took prisoners their adversaries. On the other hand, epostrakismós was making a shell skip along the surface of water by a horizontal throw, and winning by the greatest number of skips. Eis omillan [At strife], though a general expression for any con

test, was specially applied to tossing a knuckle-bone or smooth stone so as to lie in the center of a fixed circle, and to disturb those which were already in good positions. This was also done into a small hole (trópa). They seem to have shot dried beans from their fingers as we do marbles. They spun coins on their edge (chalkismós) [game of coppers].

Here are two games not perhaps so universal nowadays: pentalithizein [Fives, Jackstones] was a technical word for tossing up five pebbles or astragali, and receiving them so as to make them lie on the back of the hand. Melolonthe, or the beetle game, consists in flying a beetle by a long thread, and guiding him like a kite but by way of improvement they attached a waxed splinter, lighted, to his tail, and this cruelty is now practiced, according to a good authority (Papasliotis), in Greece, and has even been known to cause serious fires. Tops were known under various names (bembix, strómbos, stróbilos), one of them certainly a humming-top. So were hoops (trochot).

Ball-playing was ancient and diffused, even among the Homeric heroes. But as it was found very fashionable and carefully practiced by both Mexicans and Peruvians at the time of the conquest, it is probably common to all civilized races. We have no details left us of complicated games with balls; and the mere throwing them up and catching them one from the other, with some rhythmic motion, is hardly worth all the poetic fervor shown about this game by the Greeks. But possibly the musical and dancing accompaniments were very important, in the case of grown people and in historical times. Pollux, however, - our main authority for most of these games, -in one place distinctly describes both football and hand-ball. "The names," he says, "of games with balls are - epískyros, phainínda, apórraxis, ouranía. The first is played by two even sides, who draw a line in the center which they call skyros, on which they place the ball. They draw two other lines behind each side; and those who first reach the ball throw it (rhiptousin) over the opponents, whose duty it is to catch it and return it, until one side drives the other back over their goal line." Though Pollux makes no mention of kicking, this game is evidently our football in substance. He proceeds: “ Phaininda was called either from Phainindes, the first discoverer, or from phenacizein [to play tricks]." etc., - we need not follow his etymologies; "and apórraxis consists of making a ball

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bound off the ground, and sending it against a wall, counting the number of hops according as it was returned.” And as if to make the anticipations of our games more curiously complete, there is cited from the history of Manuel, by the Byzantine Cinnamus (A.D. 1200), a clear description of the Canadian lacrosse, a sort of hockey played with rackets :

"Certain youths, divided equally, leave in a level place, which they have before prepared and measured, a ball made of leather, about the size of an apple, and rush at it, as if it were a prize lying in the middle, from their fixed starting-point [a goal]. Each of them has in his right hand a racket (rhábdon) [wand, staff] of suitable length, ending in a sort of flat bend, the middle of which is occupied by gut strings dried by seasoning, and plaited together in net fashion. Each side strives to be the first to bring it to the opposite end of the ground from that allotted to them. Whenever the ball is driven by the rackets (rhábdoi) to the end of the ground, it counts as a victory."

Two games which were not confined to children - and which are not widely diffused, though they exist among usare the use of astragali, or knuckle-bones of animals, cut so nearly square as to serve for dice; and with these children threw for luck, the highest throw (sixes) being accounted the best. In later Greek art, representations of Eros and other youthful figures engaged with astragali are frequent. It is to be feared that this game was an introduction to dice-playing, which was so common, and so often abused that among the few specimens of ancient dice remaining, there are some false and some which were evidently loaded. The other game to which I allude is the Italian morra, the guessing instantaneously how many fingers are thrown up by the player and his adversary. It is surprising how fond southern men and boys still are of this simple game, chiefly however for gambling purposes.

Most unfortunately there is hardly a word left of the nursery rhymes, and of the folk-lore, which are very much more interesting than the physical amusements of children. Yet we know that such popular songs existed in plenty; we know too, from the early fame of Esop's fables, from the myths so readily invented and exquisitely told by Plato, that here we have lost a real fund of beautiful and stimulating children's stories. And of course, here too the general character of such stories throughout the human race was preserved.

ALFRED THAYER MAHAN.

ALFRED THAYER MAHAN, a distinguished American naval officer and writer on naval history, born at West Point, N.Y., Sept. 27, 1840. He served in the Civil War; and was president of the Naval War College, Newport, in 1886-1889 and 1890-1893. Visiting Europe in command of the Chicago in 1893, he received many honors, among them degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge. His chief work, "Influence of Sea Power upon History" (1890), with its continuation, "Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire" (1892), gave him a world-wide reputation. He has published also: "The Gulf and Inland Waters" (1883); "Life of Admiral Farragut" (1892); "The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future" (1897), a compilation of his magazine articles; "Life of Nelson" (1897).

THE MUTUAL RELATIONS OF ARMY AND NAVY IN TRANSMARINE WAR AND IN COLONIAL POLICY.

THE recent campaign of the United States Navy and Army in the Caribbean region, while instructive from many points of view, has especial value at the present moment to the people of the United States, as illustrative of certain necessary outlines of our future naval and military policy. Estimating at the lowest the permanent results of the late war, the nation finds itself charged with valuable transmarine possessions, which have not merely to receive the local defense which is or should be common to the country in general, but must also, for the welfare of the Commonwealth, be knit to the home. body by the only military bonds that can cross the stretch of the seas. Local protection is indeed imperative; but from the military point of view national defense, in any real sense, cannot be said to exist, when the localized defenses are not knit together, and coördinated into a system, which insures freedom of communication and thereby mutual support. Gibraltar and its Rock are the proverbial synonym of impregnability; yet Gibraltar in its time not only has fallen by local neglect, but