Are there cases which do not exhibit fighting play in any form? I do not deny the possibility, though up to this time I have not been able to discover any such. The first difficulty to surmount in trying to establish this possibility would, it seems to me, be the laughter of children when they mimic anything (for example, the cries or movements of animals), which is not in itself amusing, nor is their intention mischievous. Can this be a case where the idea of contrast works alone and there is no fighting play? I think not, for I am convinced that the child’s first impression of the comic depends on his æsthetic sympathy with the model and on his conscious shaking off of this feeling; and, furthermore, the idea of contrast is in this instance connected with the conquest of difficulty, an association which always indicates an approach to fighting play, and is especially significant in this case, since mimicry singles out the salient and individual characteristics of the model.[482] 8. _Hunting Play_ Having learned to recognise the three principal groups of fighting plays we turn now to a special application of the fighting instinct. The name “hunting play” will include, for the sake of brevity, playful pursuit, flight, and hiding. The chase is, in connection with the collecting of fruits, the oldest and most primitive method of obtaining a food supply known to us. It is not impossible that in some more primitive stage than that of modern savages human beings subsisted entirely (with the exception of some insects, young birds, and eggs) on vegetable food, as monkeys do. But we have no definite knowledge of this, and, however it may be, the facts justify the deduction that the impulse to pursue a fleeing creature, or, on the other hand, to flee and hide from approaching danger, is as much an inborn instinct in man as in the lower animals. It is true, indeed, that the arts of the chase are of vast service to evolution in other ways than in the pursuit of and escape from wild beasts, for it is often enough his fellow-man from whom the fugitive flees and must escape by speed or guile. In the case of animals the instinctiveness of the impulse is proved by their play. The kitten treats a ball of yarn exactly as an adult carnivorous animal does its prey, and that before she takes note of a living mouse; and young dogs show their wolfish nature in their chasing of one another when there is no real game to pursue. In the life of man, too, phenomena are not wanting which point to an instinctive basis for the hunting instinct, and they all belong to the sphere of play.