Page:String Figures and How to Make Them.djvu/28

CHAPTER I

DISTRIBUTION OF STRING FIGURES—NATIVE NAMES—METHODS FIRST RECORDED—ETHNOLOGICAL VALUE OF STRING GABLES—RELATIONS BETWEEN FINISHED PATTERNS MADE BY DIFFERENT RACES—RELATIONS BETWEEN NATIVE METHODS—HOW STRING FIGURES ARE MADE—DIFFERENT OPENINGS—NOMENCLATURE ADOPTED—TYPICAL MOVEMENTS DESCRIBED—EXPLANATION OF THE DESCRIPTIONS AND THE DRAWINGS.

IN our childhood we have all doubtless enjoyed the fascination of the game of Cat's-Cradle, and experienced a sense of being hopelessly baffled, when, after completing the series of familiar movements, we were at the end of our knowledge, and all our attempts to go on further ended in a complete tangle of the string. We did not know that the game, as we then played it, is one of a host of similar games played with a loop of string by savage or primitive people all over the world, and that, while our childish game is also known in many and widely separated lands, it is possibly only a survival of others now lost, and crude enough compared with the intricate and beautiful patterns devised by savage races.

For many years travellers have been calling attention to the fact that a game resembling our Cat's-Cradle is played in various parts of the world; hence we now have some idea of its geographical distribution.

We know that certain simple patterns are common in Great Britain, Europe, and the United States (in addition to the Indian games), and have been reported from India, Japan and Korea (Culin, 2, p. 3 and Weir) and China (Culin, 2, p. 30; Fielde, p. 87). Ehrenreich (p. 30 ) tells us that string games are played in South America, and I have found a few figures among the Batwa pygmies from Africa. Reports of their occurrence come chiefly, however, from explorers of the various islands of the Pacific Ocean, and from observers of the North American Indians. Thus we learn of string figures in Java from Schmeltz (p. 230); in Borneo from Wallace (p. 183), Haddon, and Furness; in Celebes from Matthes (p. 129); in the Philippines from my own studies at the St. Louis Exposition; in Australia from Bunce (p. 75), Smyth (Vol. I, p. 178), Eyre (II, p. 227), and Roth (p. 1O); in New Guinea from Finsch (1891, p. 33), Rivers and Haddon (p. 151), and Turner (p. 483); in Torres Straits from Rivers and Haddon (p. 146); in New Ireland from Finsch (1888, p. 143); in the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides from Codrington

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