AMUSING RECORDS

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXIX, Issue 13326, 1 May 1941, Page 6

AMUSING RECORDS

FAMOUS BODLEIAN LIBRARY The famous Bodleian Library at Oxford has an inteersting and amusing exhibition of children's games down the ages, showing how children in recorded times have ever trundled hoops, used skipping-ropes, whipped tops, and played leap-frog. The Bodleian Library Record conveys the little-known information that standing on one's head was an ancient game calling for much skill. Here is what it tells us: Among the solitary games, standing on the head is perhaps one of the most skilled, but seems latterly to have gone out of fashion. It is an amusment of great antiquity, and has been immortalised by Herodotus in his story of Hippocleides, who, having won a king's daughter in marriage, lost her at the weddingbreakfast by standing on his head and waving his legs aloft. His remark, "It's all one to Hippocleides," proclaimed the proud independence of a consummate comedian. After that, no doubt, the sport lost caste. According to Smith Minor it is not as easy as it looks when done by a practised performer.