Page:EB1911 - Volume 23.djvu/334

 winning his beloved, or of escaping threatened punishment, is often made to turn on his power of answering riddles. It follows from the artless and primitive character of the riddle that regular popular riddles (Devinettes) are widely distributed, like popular tales, popular songs and popular customs. The Woloffs ask, “What flies for ever and rests never?” Answer, The wind. The Basutos put this riddle, “What is wingless and legless, yet flies fast and cannot be imprisoned?” Answer, The voice. The German riddle runs, “What can go in face of the sun yet leave no shadow?” Answer, The wind. In riddles may perhaps be noticed the animistic or personalizing tendency of early human thought, just beginning to be conscious of itself. The person who asked these riddles had the old sense of wind, for example, as a person, yet probably, unlike the bushmen, he would never expect to see the personal wind. He knew the distinction between the personal and impersonal well enough to be sure that his enigma would present some difficulty. The riddle, to be brief, is an interrogatory form of the fable, and like the fable originates among rude people, and is perpetuated in the folklore of peasantry.

Probably the best book on the riddle (a subject less frequently studied than the märchen or the myth) is Eugène Rolland, Devinettes ou énigmes populaires, with a preface by M. Gaston Paris. The power of answering riddles among the people who invented the legend of Solomon and the queen of Sheba seems to have been regarded as a proof of great sagacity. The riddle proper is all but extinct outside folklore and savage life, and has been replaced by the conundrum, which is a pun in the interrogative form.

RIDGE, WILLIAM PETT (1864–), English author, was born at Chartham, near Canterbury, and was educated at Marden, Kent, and at the Birkbeck Institute, London. He was for some time a clerk in the Railway Clearing House, and began about 1891 to write humorous sketches for the St James’s Gazette and other papers. He .secured his first striking success, in volume form, with Mord Em’ly (1898), an excellent example of his ability to draw humorous portraits of lower class life. His later books include A Son of the State (1899), A Breaker of Laws (1900), Lost Property (1902), Erb (1903), Mrs Caler’s Business (1905), The Wickhamses (1906), &c.

RIDGE (a word common to many Teutonic languages, meaning “back,” whether of a man or an animal, cf. German Rücke), the word applied to many objects resembling the projecting line of an animal’s back, such as the strip of soil thrown up by a plough between furrows, the elevations or protuberances on bones which serve for the- attachment of muscles or ligaments, &c. In architecture the ridge (Fr. faite, crête; Gr. First; Ital. asinello) is the highest portion of a roof, which is covered with lead, slate, or tiles, and sometimes decorated with a cresting in terra-cotta or metal-work. The term is also applied to the meeting of the common rafters on each side of a roof, which are sometimes butted against an upright board known as the ridge-piece. For the ridge-rib see.

 RIDING, the art or practice of locomotion on the back of an animal or in a vehicle (the verb to ride originally meant “to travel,” or “go,” as the derived noun road means “a way”). Where no vehicle is specified (e.g. “riding a bicycle”), the word is associated with horseback riding, for exercise or pleasure.

The origin of the use of the horse as a means of transport goes back to prehistoric times. The fable of the centaurs, if the derivation from, to goad,  , bull, be accepted (but see ), would indicate the early existence of pastoral peoples living on horseback, like the modern cowboys (cp. “cow-punohers”) or gauchos of North and South America. Archaeological discoveries in India, Persia, Assyria and Egypt show that in the polished stone age quaternary man had domesticated the horse, while a Chinese treatise, the Goei-leaotse, the fifth book of the Vouking, a sort of military code dating from the reign of the emperor Hoang-Ti (2637 years ), places the cavalry on the wings of the army. 'The Hebrews understood