St. Johnsbury Caledonian. [volume] (St. Johnsbury, Vt.) 1867-1919, 1895-08-16
SAME OLD GAMES.
WE ARE PLAYING THOSE INVENTED
BY THE ANcIENTs.


ers Date From Away Back-NoveltIes In
, Games Rarely Catch On.
Few Of the hundreds of new games
that are invented eveSy year become
popular They may be seen in any toy
store by the score--lawn games and
parlor games, games Of cards and games
Of ball, games for young and for old.
They are a melancholy sight, for not
one of them will ever take the place of
the old standbys of infancy and boy
hood Even the names of most Of them
will never be heard of by the majority
Of American boys and girls. This is the
logic of history.
1t seems an easy matter to invent q
game. The best games are so simple,
yet popular game was never yet in
vented. Every one OF them has grown,
and the best of them have been growing
for hundreds of years. Scientific men
tell us that all sorts of queer creatures
once lived on this earth-great lizards
with wings; sea monsters, half whale,
half seal, and rhinoceroses larger than
elephants. All these have died away be-
cause they were not fitted to live, while
those animals that were fit for life have
gone on growing better and better, till
some-the horse, for instance-we could
not do without 1t is just so with
games. Those live that are fit to live,
and the rest die.
Our best games form sort of aris-
tocracy Their pedigrees run back to
very ancient times, and no modern up
start can compete with them. Take
baseball and cricket, for instance, prob
ably the most popular outdoor games of
modern times, the one in our oT q coun-
try, the other in England They are
first cousins, and their hold ON Amer
lean and English boys is in all proba-
bility due to the fact that they each unite
two strong lines of descent-that of the
bat and ball games-to which tennis,
lacrosse, hockey, croquet and, more dis
family, billiards also belong, and that
of the goal games such as tag puss in
the corner, spy and dozens of others.
All the nations we know anything
about had bat and ball games ages ago.
Nobody invented the bat and ball. They
grew up with our civilization from the
time when little savages used to knock
about pebble or a fruit with stick.
So with the goal games-they have al
ways been popular. Their name is still
legion. The goal part-that is, the run
ming from base to base-iS a much more
important part of the game in baseball
than it is in cricket, aDd for this reason
we Americans are justified in looking
upon baseball as the better game, all
other things being equal To be sure,
neither baseball nor cricket is the game
it was 800 years ago, but both have
grown, not changed.
Any one who chooses may trace the
growth of cricket from the year 1900.
| 1t is not as easy to trace the pedigree Of
baseball, for, just as with great many
American families, there is break in
the record back i'll colonial times. 1t is
known to have been played by the In
dians. 1t is q thoroughly American
game, and no one loves it less because
some people claim FOUNDERS as its an
cestor and others reject the claim with
scorn.
As for indoor games, we may prove
their nobility in just the same way.
Chess comes down to us from the an
cient Hindoos, by way of Persia. Check
ers were played in Egypt, and then in
| Greece and Rome. Cards made their ap-
pearance in Europe in 1850, and the
Chinese say that they used them two
centuries earlier than this Tenpins was
certainly played in the thirteenth CEN
tury and probably much earlier. All
these have grown, but they have not
changed their nature.
Lawn tennis is only an offshoot of the
old game Of court tennis, said to have
been brought into Gaul by Roman SOL
diers and still played. Again only a
growth, not a new device. There is
halma-only a variation of the old pyr-
amid game Of checkers. How about
parchesi? The pompous title, "a Royal
Game of India" inscribed on the old
parchesi board is often thought to have
been only an advertising dodge, but it
was quite true Parchesi, called by the
Hindoos pachisi, is widely played in
Asiatic countries, and the Spanish ex-
plorers even found the Aztecs playing it
under the name of patolli in Mexico,
whittier it may have been carried across
the Pacific.
These and many other instances are
worth thinking over deeply, for they
teach a lesson. If any one is tired CT
the old games and wants something a
little different, let him alter the old in
the direction of growth rather than try
to invent something quite different. The
most successful inventors of games have
followed this rule. Indeed it is more
than a rule 1t is a law of nature. You
might as we'll try to please the human
palate with food made out of sand and
sawdust as to force boy or man to get
enjoyment out of a game that does not
contain the old, well tried game ele-
ments. New York World.
Words Which Rhyme Not.