rod, and each side endeavours to get the ball over the other’s base or to prevent such a result when it threatens their own. This is a specialized form of reciprocal mass contest, since the enemy is not attacked in person, but the effort is made to wrest from him a symbolic stronghold, as is common in mental contests. There are many similar ball games—for instance, baseball—where the ball is thrown by hand and its analogue found among the North American Indians; and cricket, where a single player, armed with a bat, defends the easily approached wicket. The idea is carried further when the ball which is thrown becomes the goal as well, so that the same instrument is at once weapon and symbol of the enemy. Playful pelting is indulged in in carnival times, when berries and confetti are thrown about promiscuously; in former times there were many occasions for this lively sort of play. Travellers experience the primitive impulse which makes it hard for them to resist the temptation to throw when in midsummer they stand in a little snow field, and students are universally given to throwing beer mugs, in spite of its being occasionally dangerous. The principle of returning offensive missiles is not much applied in play, and yet I remember that as a boy I enjoyed shooting with bow and arrow at another boy similarly armed. We stood about fifteen feet apart and tried to hit each other with light and harmless cane arrows. A still more innocent battle was fought with popgun and berries. It is doubtful whether children really play with thrusting weapons; they rather exercise than fight with their wooden swords and spears, but when it comes to an offensive use of the weapons play turns to earnest, and, as with the young Goethe, ends disastrously in quarrelling and blows. Boys who are much older engage in actual fighting plays with such weapons, but it is left to the students’ duels to exhibit its highly developed form. Some years ago the half-grown sons of a professor in a university town went to a fencing hall and fought out a regular contest in a perfectly friendly spirit, although it was by no means bloodless. Many readers will no doubt recall such incidents. Such contests between boys and young men are very interesting, and in Germany we distinguish between them and real duels in that they are playful, while the latter are brought about by some serious offence. That serious wounds sometimes result from these fencing matches is no argument against their playful character, for many games are dangerous, and these contests certainly come within our definition of a play, the satisfaction afforded by them being not in conquest but in fighting as such. When, indeed, one student provokes another intentionally from dislike or anger, the fighting which results is not a play; but the elaborately arranged appointments and the fencing matches which result from some remarks made, perhaps, in all courtesy, though it may end in injury to one or both parties,