M. R CHAPTER II. GROUND GAMES, WHERE THE ROLLING OR THROWING OF CIRCULAR OBJECTS IS A PRINCIPAL FEATURE. 400 B.C QUOIT-THROWER W WITH the ancients, quoits seems to have been the most popular of games for exhibiting the great strength of the competitors; while javelin-throwing and archery took foremost places as games of skill. It would appear that the quoit or discus was sometimes rolled away; or when thrown would strike the ground on its edge and roll some distance further. The game thus played might have suggested skittles. The axiom that doctors differ is Greek Gratue quite applicable here, and there is every reason for believing that the quoit was not always a discus. Dr. Johnson makes a distinction between the quoit and discus; the former, he says, was a game of skill, and the latter a game of strength.' Quoits were also used as weapons to kill, as instanced by the story of the execution of the inventor of toughened glass, whose head was lopped off with a sharp-edged quoit, by the order of Tiberius; so that the invention should not become known and the value of metals depreciated. The The Chakra or sharpedged quoit, used by footsoldiers in the east, is very ancient. Representations of the gods with the chakra grasped in one of their numerous hands, are frequently met with in the ruined temples of India. It was used by the Sikhs against the British in the Panjaub. The Chakai is a Hindoo toy composed of two wheels rolled on the ground, manipulated with a string. In Pompeii a small bronze statuette was discovered, which savants declare to be contemporary with the Greek sculptors, Myron and Pheidias, 500 B.C. It is a discobolus, so called, and represents an athlete in an attitude of rolling rather than throwing. In other works the action of throwing or putting is clearly indicated. The early 1Apollo was credited with great skill in the games, though he unfortunately killed the beautiful boy Hyacynthus with a quoit, which induced him to create a flower to his memory. Apollonaria were games held in honour of Apollo at Rome. Excavated at Pompell Greeks sometimes hurled the quoit "in the manner of a bowl," and the quoits were of different sizes and figures, including the sphaeristic.1 Hone, in noticing the "parish game of curling," 2 says, the "stones used are called coits or quoits, or coiting or quoiting-stones." In Smith's Antiquities it is stated that the discus was sometimes a sphere. Some writers describe the discus or quoit as a flat metal plate; others that it was hollowed like a shield; again, that it was a round heavy mass of copper, stone, or H.J.D. iron, thicker in the middle than towards Bronze Statuette the circumference. The latter form is so like the skittle, that the knocking down of pins with a missile, thus described, may have originated the skittle game. Walker defines skittle as "a piece of wood like a sugar-loaf used in the game of skittles," and in a note, says, "This word is in no dictionary that I have ever seen; nor do I know its derivation. It is described by 'Potter's Grecian Antiquities. 2 Other games, where discs are used (such as coins), are shove-groat, slidethrift, slip-thrift, and shofle-boorde. Hop-scotch, or peever, is another phase of the sliding-disc game. FAL. "Quoit him down, Bardolf, like a shove-groat shilling." C Shakespeare. Johnson, under the word loggats, to be kittle-pins set up and thrown down by a bowl; but what kittle-pins are, neither he nor any other of our lexicographers informs us." Ogilvie goes further, and defines skittle-ball, "a disc of hard wood for throwing at the pins in the game of skittles," and gives the derivation from the "AngloSaxon sceotan, scytan, to shoot; scyte, literally a shooting." "A well-known game still common under the name of skittles is thus alluded to in Poor Robin, 1707— "Ladies for pleasure now resort Unto Hide-park and Totnam Court; As merry are as birds in May.1" Skittles and nine-pins are alike, in respect to pieces of wood being stuck up, to be knocked over; but it is quite XIV CENTURY. MS. Royal Library. club-Rayles. Strult. HID. clear the skittle is a flat bowl, not a ball; the nine-pin 1 Brand's Antiquities. Pepys alludes to nine-pins in 1660. 2 See footnote on page 25. bowl being used in other variations of the game, such as four-corners, cloish, and kayles; the terms skittle-alley and bowling-alley denoting two distinct games. The following curious wager is recorded in the Gentlemen's Magazine. On the 4th of August, 1739, a farmer of Croyden undertook, for a considerable wager, to bowl a skittle-bowl from that town to London Bridge, about eleven miles, in 500 times, and performed it in 445. French "nine-pins" (?) les quilles, is equivalent to the English game of kayles, being six or more pins stuck up to be knocked down by a bowl. In club-kayles, however, a short club or baton is used, not a bowl. The poet Burns in The Battle of Sherra Muir uses this expression "They hough'd the clans like nine-pin kyles." Loggats, another term for nine-pins, is mentioned in Hamlet "Did these bones cost no more the breeding, But to play at loggats with them." Sir Thomas Urquhart, of Cromarty, in his curious work entitled The Discovery of a most exquisite Jewel, found in the Kennel of Worcester Street, the day after the fight, 1651, says-" They likewise may be said to use their king as the players at nine-pins do the middle kyle, which they call the king, at whose fall they aim, the sooner to the gaining of their prize." The centre |