Page:Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje - The Achehnese Vol II. - tr. Arthur Warren Swete O'Sullivan (1906).djvu/223

 civilization in every region of the globe. The same is true of legends, theories regarding nature and the universe, proverbs etc.

But—the tiger-games and the marbles warn us of it—the fact that games such as these have been so widely spread by borrowing must prevent us too hastily excluding every form of indirect contact or interchange, even between peoples entirely strange to one another.

The examination of apparently insignificant pastimes has a value long since recognized in comparative ethnography and gives us at the same time an insight into the method of training the young practised by different peoples. More than this, in the games of children there survive dead or dying customs and superstitions of their ancestors, so that they form a little museum of the ethnography of the past.

Of this we find a beautiful example in the Ni Towong in Java. In some districts in that island a figure is composed of a creel or basket with brooms for arms, a cocoanut-shell for head and eyes of chalk and soot, dressed in a garment purposely stolen for the occasion and otherwise rigged out so as to give it something of the human shape. This is placed in a cemetery by old women on the evening before Friday amid the burning of incense, and an hour or two later it is carried away to the humming of verses of incantation, the popular belief being that it is inspired with life by Ni Towong during the above process. Some women hold a mirror before the figure thus artificially endowed with a soul, and after beholding itself there in it is supposed to move of its own accord and to answer by gestures the questions put to it by the surrounding crowd, telling the maiden of her destined bridegroom, pointing out to the sick the tree whose leaf will cure his ailment, and so on.

Children who have often been present and beheld this apparation of Ni Towong, imitate it in their play, and continue to do so even when other superstitions or Mohammedan orthodoxy have relegated the original to obscurity, as is the case in many districts of Java and also at Batavia.

Thus too in all probability ancestral superstitions and disused customs survives in certain other pastimes of the young in Sumatra as well as in Java. They might be described as games of suggestion. We find an example among the Sundanese in Java, who in their momonyetan, měměrakan and similar games impart to their comrades the characteristics of the ape, the peacock or some other animal. The boy who submits