Page:String Figures and How to Make Them.djvu/36

Rh and at the same time aid materially in cultivating manual dexterity and a race coordination of brain and hand.

Moreover, two persons can play string games together, the right hand of one and the left hand of the other forming one figure while the other hands are forming an entirely different figure; in the same way many persons can play together.

It should be remembered that the following descriptions follow exactly the methods used by the natives; doubtless other ways of forming the same figures exist, or can be devised, but I have not deemed it right, on the ethnological grounds given above, to change the methods shown to me at first hand or recorded by others.

The invention of new figures is a fascinating diversion, and is of value because thereby a student becomes more expert and therefore better trained to observe and record native games. One pretty figure I invented, as I flattered myself, only to find out later that it is common among the natives of the Caroline Islands. A few of these invented games have been added at the end of the book merely as examples of what may be done.

In the illustrations which accompany the descriptions we have the first serious attempt to show the successive steps in string games by pictures of the fingers picking up and arranging the strings and of the result produced by each movement. Heretofore, as a rule, only finished patterns have been drawn, or stretched out on cards for exhibition in a museum. Moreover, the illustrations represent the various steps as they are seen by the person making the figure. We have observed great care to have the strings and the loops, and their manner of crossing one another, accurately drawn. In a few figures only, where the strings run into small twists or knots in the centre between the hands, it has not been possible to trace individual strings throughout their entire course, but wherever this has been possible, even in the most complex figures, I think the artist has been unusually successful and has rendered faithfully the effects of strain and of deflection produced by crosses, knots, and twists. In illustrating a step which requires that each hand shall perform, independently, the same movement at the same time, in order to reduce the number of drawings without sacrificing any important stages in the process, one drawing, as a rule, serves to show two stages: one hand usually the left, being represented as beginning the movement, the other hand as completing it (see Fig. 9).