Children are fond of displaying their mental acquirements even before they are old enough to go to school, but it is there, of course, that the best opportunity is afforded them. Colozza tells us how the Italian children use their recess time for contests over the multiplication table.[410] During school hours recitation is easily transformed to emulation which can be turned to account by the judicious teacher with better results than are attained by one who tries to draw the line too rigidly between work and play. The intellectual rivalries of adults are exceedingly varied. Music offers unlimited opportunities when people are far enough advanced to have any sort of society, and even primitive tribes indulge in this sort of entertainment. Among the Eskimos the contestants compete in public for the prize for singing, and then fall into actual combat, thus combining the two forms of rivalry. Grosse quotes from Rink the following musical dialogue between two East Greenlanders. “Savdlat: ‘The south, the south, oh, the south over there! As I stood on the headland I saw Pulangitsissok, who had grown fat upon halibut. The people of this land know not how to speak. Therefore they are ashamed of their language. They are dumb over there; their speech is not like ours. In the north we speak in one way, different from those in the south. Therefore we can not understand their talk.’” To this challenge Pulangitsissok responds: “‘There was a time, as Savdlat knows, when I was a good sledger, when I could take a heavy load on my kajak. Four years ago he found this out. That was the time when Savdlat bound his kajak to mine for fear he might capsize. Then he could carry a good load on his kajak, too. As I was tugging along you cried out pitifully, and were afraid and almost overturned. I had to hold on to my ropes to keep us up.’”[411] Such sarcastic dialogue often leads to direct contests, in which the singers try to rout one another by means of their witty improvisations. A later form is the contest in oratory and song on an assigned theme, opening with a direct challenge between the contestants. The poem of Wartburg-Krieg is especially famed, while Plata’s symposium may be instanced as a fine example of competitive oratory on a given theme.