There can be no doubt that puppets or dolls are of great antiquity; they were common with the ancient Egyptians, and here (Fig. 15) is an illustration of a doll from Thebes which is now in the British Museum, and you will notice that the head is covered with holes which served for the insertion of strings of beads to represent hair. Puppets were also in use with the Greeks, and afterwards found their way to Rome, and it is an interesting fact that, about three years ago, while the ground was being excavated for the foundations of the new Palais de Justice at Rome, at a spot not far from the Vatican, a stone coffin was discovered containing the skeleton of a young girl of about fifteen years of age, who had teeth of great beauty, and in her arms was a beautifully modelled wooden doll with jointed limbs which was dressed in a rich material. The interment had taken place in the time of Pliny, who refers to the child, and mentions that she was engaged to be married, a statement which is supported by the fact that on one of the fingers is a doubly-linked gold ring, besides other ornaments. The coffin, with its contents as they were found, is now in the museum in the Capitol and it is, I believe, the only instance of an ancient doll having been found in Rome, although moving puppets or marionettes were known in very ancient times, and are referred to by Xenophon, Aristotle, Horace, Antoninus, Galen, and Aulus Gellius. The next figure is an illustration of what I suppose must be the very earliest moving doll in existence to-day; it is now in the Museum van Oudheden at Leyden, and is a toy which belonged to a child of ancient Egypt; I have constructed a model of it by which you will see that it is worked by pulling a thread; and here I must make a passing reference to the notorious phallic figures which were carried in procession during the festivals of Osiris and in the Dionysia of Bacchus. We are told by Lucian[7] that “Among the several sorts of Phalloi which the Greeks set up in honour of Bacchus there were figures of dwarfs with moving parts actuated by strings, which were called ‘Νευροσπαστα’.” In so eminently proper a community as We are in Ye Sette of Odd Volumes, I am unable to describe these figures in detail, or to exhibit them in action, but those who are _curious_ as well as _odd_ will find abundant evidence of them in the writings of Herodotus, of Lucian, of Pausanias, of Athenæus, of Plutarch, of Gyraldus, and of several other writers. [Illustration: Fig. 16.] The earliest forms of moving puppets were set in motion by strings pulled by hand which were afterwards supplanted by cylinders turned by a winch, and the transition from that arrangement to the use of weights and springs was inevitable and was only a question of time.