In colour-drawing, or painting, the Egyptian wall-paintings show a style half-way between the lowest and the highest. Here the scenes of old Egyptian life are caught at their characteristic moments, the shoemaker is seen drawing his thread, the fowler throwing at the ducks, the lords and ladies feasting and the flute-players and tumblers performing before them. Yet with all their clever expressiveness, the Egyptian paintings have not quite left behind the savage stage of art. In fact they are still picture-writings rather than pictures, repeating rows of figures with heads, legs, and arms drawn to pattern, and coloured in childish daubs of colour—hair all black, skin all red-brown, clothing white, and so on. The change from these to the Greek paintings is surprising; now we have no more rows of man-patterns, but grouped studies of real men. The best works of the Greek painters are only known to moderns by the admiring descriptions of the ancients, but more ordinary specimens which have been preserved give an idea what the paintings of Zeuxis and Apelles may have been. The tourist visiting for the first time the museum of Naples comes with a shock of surprise in face of Alexander of Athens’ picture of the goddesses at play, the boldly drawn frescos of scenes from the Iliad, and the groups of dancers elegant in drawing and colouring. Most of these pictures from Herculaneum and Pompeii were done by mere house decorators, but these tenth-rate Greek painters had the traditions of the great classic school, and they show plainly that from the same source we also have inherited the art of design. Modern European painting comes in two ways from ancient art. On the one hand, Greek painting spread over the Roman Empire and into the East, and for ages found its chief home in the Christian art of Constantinople, whence arose the Byzantine style, often called pre-Raffaelite, which though wanting in the older freedom of classic Athens, was expressive and rich in colour. On the other hand, when in the fifteenth century the knowledge of classic art and thought revived in Europe, the stiff pictures of saints and martyrs gave place to more natural and graceful forms, and modern painting arose under Raffaelle and Michael Angelo, Titian and Murillo, in whom the two streams from the fountain-head of Greek art, so long separated, joined again. The ancients mostly painted on walls like the present fresco-painting, or on waxed wooden panels; they did not know the use of oil to mix the ground colours with. This is just mentioned in the tenth century, so that the story of the brothers Van Eyck inventing oil-painting in the fifteenth century is not quite true. But they turned it to practical use, and from their time painters brought the substance and play of colour to a perfection which there is no reason to suppose the ancients ever approached. In modern times water-colour painting, used by the old masters for light sketches and studies, has also become an art of itself, especially in England. One branch of painting in which the moderns unquestionably surpass the ancients is landscape. Of old, however admirably the figures might be drawn, the hard conventional mountains, forests, and houses behind were still in the picture-writing stage, they rather stood as signs of the world outside than depicted it as it is. But now the artist’s eyes are turned on nature, which he renders with a truthfulness unknown to the old masters who first gave living form to gods and heroes, apostles and martyrs.
Something has now to be said of games, for play is one of the arts of pleasure. It is doing for the sake of doing, not for what is done. One class of games is spontaneous everywhere, the sports in which children imitate the life they will afterwards have to act in earnest. Eskimo children play at building snow huts, and their mothers provide them with a tiny oil-lamp with a bit of wick to set burning inside. Among the savages whose custom it is to carry off their wives by force from neighbouring tribes, the children play at the game of wife-catching, just as with us children play at weddings with a clergyman and bridesmaids. All through civilization, toy weapons and implements furnish children at once play and education; the North American warrior made his boy a little bow and arrow as soon as he could draw it, and the young South Sea Islander learnt by throwing a reed at a rolling ring how in after-life to hurl his spear. It is curious to see that when growing civilization has cast aside the practical use of some ancient contrivance, it may still survive as a toy, as where Swiss children to this day play at making fire by the old-world plan of drilling one piece of wood into another; and in our country lanes the children play with bows and arrows and slings, the serious weapons of their forefathers.
It is not quite easy to say whether man in a low savage state ever goes beyond these practical sports, and invents games of mere play. But higher up in civilization, such games are known from very ancient times. A trifling game, if it exactly takes hold of the playful mind, may last on in the world almost for ever. The ancient Egyptians, as their old paintings show, used to play our childish game of hot-cockles, where the blind-man who stoops down has to guess who thumped him on the back. These Egyptians played also the game of guessing the sum of the fingers held up by the two players, which is still popular in China, and in Italy, where one hears it half the night through with shouts of “three!” “seven!” “five!” “mora!”; it is a pity we have not this as a children’s game in England, for it trains a sharp eye and a quick hand. While some of our games, such as hoops and whipping-tops, have gone on in the Old World for thousands of years, others are modern importations; thus it was only about Stuart times that English children learnt from the Chinese, or some other nation in the far East, the art of flying kites. Or modern sports may be late improvements on old ones; the split shank-bones fastened under the shoes for going on the ice delighted the London ’prentices for centuries before they were displaced by steel skates. How a game may sometimes go on for ages unchanged, and then suddenly turn into a higher form, is curiously seen in the game of ball. The ancients tossed and caught balls like children now, and a famous Greek and Roman lad’s game was “common ball,” where there were two sides, and each tried to get the ball and throw it to the opposite goal. This is still played in a few country-places in England; its proper name is “hurling,” and football with the great leather ball is a variety of it. The ancients never seem to have used a stick or bat in their ball-play. But some 1,000 or 1,500 years ago the Persians began to play ball on horseback, which of course could only be done with a long stick, mallet, or racket; in this way there came into existence the fine sport of chaugán, which has lasted ever since in the East, and lately established itself in England under the name of polo. When once the club or racket had been invented for horseback, it was easy to use it on foot, and thus in the middle ages there began the whole set of games in which balls are hit with bats, such as pall-mall and croquet, tennis, hockey and golf, rounders and cricket.
Indoor games, too, have their curious history. Throwing lots or dice is far too ancient for any record to remain of its beginning, and the very draught-boards and men which the old Egyptians used to play on are still to be seen. The Greeks and Romans were draught-players, but their games were not like our modern game of draughts. On the other hand our merells or morris belongs to an old classical group of games, and Ovid alludes to the childish game of tit-tat-to. These games are played in China as well, and it is not known at which end of the earth they were first devised. The great invention in intellectual games may have been made a thousand years or so ago, when some Hindu, whose name is lost, set to work upon the old draught-board and men, and developed out of them a war-game, where on each side a king and his general, with elephants, chariots, and cavalry, and the foot-soldiers in front, met in battle array. This was the earliest chess, which with some little change passed into the modern European chess that still holds pre-eminence among sports, taxing the mind to its utmost stretch of foresight and combination. Our modern draughts is a sort of simplified chess, where the pieces are all pawns till they get across the board and become queens. The story in the history-books that cards were invented in France to amuse Charles VI. is a fiction, for they were known in the East centuries earlier. But at any rate the Europeans make with them combinations of skill and chance which excel anything contrived by their Asiatic inventors. Games which exercise either body or mind have been of high value in civilization as trainers of man’s faculties. Games of pure chance played for money stand on quite a different footing; they have been from the first a delusion and a curse. In our own time, there is perhaps no more pitiable sign of the slowness with which scientific ideas spread, than to hear the well-dressed crowds round the gaming-table at Monaco talking about runs of luck, and fancying that it makes a difference whether one backs the black or the red. This goes on although schoolboys are now taught the real doctrine of chances, and how to reckon the fixed percentage of each week’s stakes that will be raked in by the croupier, and not come back.
CHAPTER XIII.
SCIENCE.
Science, [309]—Counting and Arithmetic, [310]—Measuring and Weighing, [316]—Geometry, [318]—Algebra, [322]—Physics, [323]—Chemistry, [328]—Biology, [329]—Astronomy, [332]—Geography and Geology, [335]—Methods of Reasoning, [336]—Magic, [338].
Science is exact, regular, arranged knowledge. Of common knowledge savages and barbarians have a vast deal, indeed the struggle of life could not be carried on without it. The rude man knows much of the properties of matter, how fire burns and water soaks, the heavy sinks and the light floats, what stone will serve for the hatchet and what wood for its handle, which plants are food and which are poison, what are the habits of the animals that he hunts or that may fall upon him. He has notions how to cure, and much better notions how to kill. In a rude way he is a physicist in making fire, a chemist in cooking, a surgeon in binding up wounds, a geographer in knowing his rivers and mountains, a mathematician in counting on his fingers. All this is knowledge, and it was on these foundations that science proper began to be built up, when the art of writing had come in and society had entered on the civilized stage. We have to trace here in outline the rise and progress of science. And as it has been especially through counting and measuring that scientific methods have come into use, the first thing to do is to examine how men learnt to count and measure.
Even those who cannot talk can count, as was well shown by the deaf-and-dumb lad Massieu, who wrote down among the recollections of his childhood before the Abbé Sicard educated him, “I knew the numbers before my instruction; my fingers had taught me them.” We ourselves as children began arithmetic on our fingers and now and then take to them still, so that there is no difficulty in understanding how a savage whose language has no word for a number above three will manage to reckon perhaps a list of fifteen killed and wounded, how he will check off one finger for each man, and at last hold up his hand three times to show the result. The next question is, how numeral words came to be invented. This is answered by many languages, which show in the plainest way how counting on fingers and toes led to making numerals. When a Zulu wants to express the number six, he says tatisitupa, which means “taking the thumb;” this signifies that the speaker has counted all the fingers of his left hand, and begun with the thumb of the right. When he comes to seven, for instance when he has to express that his master bought seven oxen, he will say u kombile, that is, “he pointed”; this signifies that in counting he had come to the pointing-finger or forefinger. In this way the words “hand,” “foot,” “man,” have in various parts of the world become numerals. An example how they are worked may be taken from the language of the Tamanacs of the Orinoco; here the term for five means “whole hand,” six is “one of the other hand,” and so on up to ten or “both hands”; then “one to the foot” is eleven, and so on to “whole foot” or fifteen, “one to the other foot” or sixteen, and thence to “one man,” which signifies twenty, “one to the hands of the next man” being twenty-one, and the counting going on in the same way to “two men” which stands for forty, &c. &c. Now this state of things teaches a truth which has sometimes been denied, that the lower races of men have, like ourselves, the faculty of progress or self-improvement. It is evident that there was a time when the ancestors of these people had in their languages no word for fifteen or sixteen, nor even for five or six, for if they had they could not have been so stupid as to change them for their present clumsy phrases about hands and feet and men. We see back to the time when, having no means of reckoning such numbers except on their fingers and toes, they found they had only to describe in words what they were doing, and such a phrase as “both hands” would serve them as a numeral for ten. Then they would keep up these as numerals after their original sense was lost, like the Vei negros who called the number twenty mo bande, but had forgotten that this must have meant “a person finished.” The languages of nations long civilized seldom show such plain meaning in their numerals, perhaps because they are so ancient and have undergone such change. But all through the languages of the world, savage or civilized, with exceptions too slight to notice here, there is ineffaceable proof that the numerals arose out of the primitive counting on fingers and toes. This always led men to reckon by fives, tens, and twenties, and so they reckon still. The quinary kind of counting (by fives) is that of tribes like the negros of Senegal, who count one, two, three, four, five, five-one, five-two, &c.; we never count numbers thus in words, but we write them so in the Roman numerals. The decimal counting (by tens) is the most usual in the world, and our ordinary counting is done by it, thus eighty-three is “eight tens and three.” The vigesimal counting (by twenties) which is the regular mode in many languages, has its traces left in the midst of the decimal counting of civilized Europe, as in English “fourscore and three,” French “quatre-vingt trois,” that is “four twenties and three.” Thus it can hardly be doubted that the modern world has inherited direct from primitive man his earliest arithmetic worked on nature’s counting-board—the hands and feet. This also explains ([p. 18]) why the civilized world uses a numeral system based on the inconvenient number ten, which will not divide either by three or four. Were we starting our arithmetic afresh, we should more likely base it on the duodecimal notation, and use dozens and grosses instead of tens and hundreds.
To have named the numbers was a great step, but words hardly serve beyond the very simplest arithmetic, as any one may satisfy himself by trying to multiply “seven thousand eight hundred and three” by “two hundred and seventeen” in words, without helping himself by turning them in thought into figures. How did men come to the use of numeral figures? To this question the beginning of an answer may be had from barbaric picture-writing, as where a North American warrior will make four little marks //// to show that he has taken four scalps. This is very well for the small numbers, but becomes clumsy for higher ones. So already when writing was in its infancy, the ancients had fallen upon the device of making special marks for their fives, tens, hundreds, &c., leaving the simple strokes to be used only for the few units over. This is well seen in [Fig. 76] which shows how numeration was worked in ancient Egypt and Assyria. Nor has this old method died out in the world, for the Roman numerals I., V., X., L., still in common use among ourselves, are arranged on much the same principle. Another device, which arose out of the alphabet, was to take the letters in their order to stand for numbers. Thus the sections of Psalm CXIX. are numbered by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, and the books of the Iliad by the letters of the Greek alphabet. By these various plans the arithmetic of the ancient civilized nations made great progress. Still their numeration was very cumbrous in comparison with that of the modern world. Let us put down MMDCLXIX. and multiply by CCCXLVIII., or β͵χʹξʹθʹ by τʹμʹηʹ, and a few minutes’ trial will not fail to convince us of the superiority of our ciphers.