TOY

plaything for an infant or child. A toy is often an instrument used in a game. Toys, playthings, and games survive from the most remote past and from a great variety of cultures. They vary from the simplest to the most complex, from the natural stick selected by a child and imagined to be a hobbyhorse to sophisticated and complex mechanical devices that entertained both young and old in the courts of 18th-century Europe. Museums in many countries exhibit antique objects, the original purpose of which may be unknown but which children may have used or adopted for playthings. A clay animal figure on wheels, from an early Mexican culture in which no other record of the wheel has been discovered, may have been a toy. One of the most ancient toys is the ball. Play with toys follows two main directions, imitative and instructive. The earliest types of play probably developed from the instinct for self-preservation. In many human cultures, one of the first things taught to the young was the use of weapons, and the natural club or stick was the prototype of toy swords, guns, tanks, airplanes, ships, and other military instruments of play. Most games and sports requiring physical action derived from practice of the skills of warfare, and the instruments of the game or sport were regarded as weapons. Toy soldiers and weapons dating from the Middle Ages are extant. The latest developments in warfare are represented among contemporary toys, as are those weapons and machines fantasized in science fiction books and motion pictures. A basic toy is the doll (q.v.). Every epoch and culture has provided its children with miniatures of human beings or animals and of the artifacts used in daily living. Many static toys are of this type: miniature versions of real beings or objects that lend themselves to an imaginative or imitative use. Moving toys include a wider variety. It is probable that many experiments with basic physical principles were first realized in the form of moving toys known through literary description. Explosive toy weapons and rockets developed from the early use of gunpowder for fireworks by the Chinese. Balance and counterbalance, the wheel, the swing, the pendulum, flight, centrifugal force, magnetism, the spring, and a multitude of other devices and principles have been utilized in toys. Modern technological developments have made possible the production of such sophisticated moving toys as scale-model electric railroad trains and auto-racing tracks and cars, radio-controlled model aircraft, and dolls that walk, talk, and perform other stunts when activated by a beam of light. Coordination and other manual skills develop from cumulative childhood experiences received during the manipulation of toysmarbles, jackstones, and other toys requiring use of hands and bodies. Mental agility, beginning with childhood, is challenged by puzzles of spatial relationships. Roman children and adults threw knucklebones, which were probably the precursors of dice as well as of jackstones. Dice, in turn, are essential in a host of other games of chance. Other forms of toys probably derive from magical artifacts and fetishes that played a prominent part in primitive religions. In celebrating the Mexican festival of the Day of the Dead, sugar is formed into elaborate and beautiful skulls, tombs, and angels; they are essentially religious symbols, but in the hands of children they become toys that are played with and finally eaten. Christmas-tree decorations, Easter eggs, the Neapolitan presepio (crche) with its wealth of elaborate figures representing the birth of Jesus are other examples of toys of religious origin. A modern relic of early culture, the kachina doll of the Pueblo Indians, while essentially an instructive sacred object, inevitably is played with by children. Under the pressure of industrialization, folk culture and tradition are rapidly disappearing, but in many countries a variety of folk or homemade toys can still be found. Toys in developed countries are usually mass-produced, with technology providing their locomotion and other actions.